React Native: Building Native Mobile Apps with JavaScript

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Develop native mobile apps using JavaScript and React. React Native is a JavaScript-based, cross-platform app development framework.

Digital engagement is one of the key aspects today that determines the overall market dominance of any business. With smartphones leading the charge in the digital space, mobile apps have become the most powerful tool that businesses can deploy for process optimization, customer reach-out, among many other objectives. Moreover, since almost every smartphone sold these days runs either iOS or Android operating system, to choose between the two is a major dilemma, especially for startups and medium-scale businesses with limited resources. Because as you may know, building a native application for any of these platforms isn’t cheap and takes months to complete even by top app development companies.

But Facebook has something better to offer. Initially used for its internal developments and now open-sourced, React Native is a framework that compiles JavaScript code into native codebase. Think of it this way- if native applications are of superior quality but are expensive, while hybrid applications are cost-effective but fall short on performance, React Native is the bridge between the two. It delivers the performance and experience parallel to native apps at the cost equivalent to hybrid apps.

Now let’s first take a look at how it manages to achieve such competence, after which we will get into its the specific benefits and shortfalls.

While there are plenty of cross-platform app development tools available, React Native definitely delivers the best performance and user experience despite using a similar technology stack. While other applications use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create first web applications that are further wrapped in the native shell of each platform, React Native directly complies the JavaScript code to the target native platform. This essentially means that instead of creating native-like components, it uses the already available native components to offer superior results.

The benefits to gain:

Cross-platform accessibility

The most important benefit of React Native is that it enables developers to create a common code that can be deployed for all platforms. This means the developers do not even have to know languages like Java and Swift to create applications for Android and iOS. All they have to do is write the code in JavaScript which is then wrapped for each particular platform for a native experience.

Quick development

While the leverage of writing a single codebase for all platforms and the easy learning curve are major factors for quick development, even the single codebase that developers write uses a lot of reusable components to make the development quicker. Especially on the UI front, most of the commonly used elements are readily available and can be used to build or scale the applications faster than ever.

Cost-effective

Since the apps developed in React Native need less coding and are developed quickly, they are bound to cost much lesser than native applications. Additionally, if you take into account the future maintenance and scaling, it would obviously be much cheaper to manage one hybrid application over two native ones.

In short, if you want to build an application for both Android and iOS, and you want it to be built quickly and within a limited budget, while keeping high quality, there is no better alternative than React Native.

That said, it doesn’t mean React Native is perfect. Otherwise, why would anyone even care to build those expensive native applications? The fact is, it is good enough but it does have its limitations. Here are a few of them:

As mentioned earlier, React Native development deploys reusable components for many common tasks. But if the application needs to have fully customized solutions, it may get tricky for React Native to implement and will consume a lot of time and effort.

Also read: Top 10 Reasons for Founders to Choose React Native

Since React uses an additional layer to bridge the gap between JavaScript and native code, the performance does take the toll. While being better than other hybrid solutions, it surely falls behind the true native performance.

While almost 89% to 90% of the codebase remains common for both the platforms, developers may sometimes struggle to implement that remaining part because of platform-specific features, i.e. when something is a native feature of iOS and not available on Android.

As you may have observed, the benefits of React Native easily outweigh those few shortfalls. So, if you are looking for a high-quality app without compromising on your tight budget, React Native app development is the best solution you can avail. But if you are still concerned about the possible limitations, get in touch with our experts to discuss your proposal and know which technology stack will most appropriately address your unique business challenges. Be it React Native development or Native app development, we excel in both.

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About Author
Mrityunjay Kumar

Mrityunjay Kumar

Mrityunjay is a content developer at Konstant Infosolutions- a leading mobile app development firm that caters to enterprises of all scales and industries with cutting-edge tech solutions. Being an engineer by education, a reader by passion, and a writer by profession, he finds no topic truly boring, yet nothing seems to content his craving as well- an essence he leaves in everything he writes.

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