React Native has come a long way since its inception a few years ago. While the development experience was not always ideal, the community around it has grown tremendously, and now many aspects of building, upgrading, and distributing apps have become much easier or even fully abstracted by companies like Expo. React Native has gained widespread adoption by development teams and product companies around the globe, due to its numerous benefits, such as:
✅ Cross-platform app with a single codebase: cheaper to build and maintain the app, cheaper bugfixes and new features.
✅ A thriving community and increasing adoption from large companies like Microsoft and Shopify.
✅ A larger pool of potential hires, as React developers can be trained to be React Native developers.
From a technical standpoint, we are excited to see some changes to React Native that will significantly increase the developer experience, app quality and performance, and increase adoption even further:
🔧 More and more third-party libraries will leverage Javascript Interface (JSI) instead of the bridge. This makes a lot of the communication between the native and Javascript layer synchronous and m*uch *faster.
🏗️ Expo, with its cloud service EAS, is an amazing and quick way to get started with your React Native app. In its managed workflow you can an increasing number of APIs that give you access to device capabilities. Additionally, EAS streamlines the building and distribution process.
🚂 Hermes is becoming the default Javascript engine for React Native, resulting in faster app startup times and faster apps.
⭐️ React Native is continuously introducing quality-of-life improvements, such as Flexbox gap, which we already know and love from the browser and is coming to React Native 0.71. Libraries like Reanimated and react-native-skia make the possibilities of complex UIs endless. We highly recommend to check out the "Can it be done in React Native?" series by William Candillon.
React Native is in a good place, it's stable and, now more than ever, capable of building compelling mobile applications. Large companies like Shopify are going all-in on React Native, so what's holding you back?
At Easy Street, we can assist you with the architecture or development of your current or next mobile app. Still uncertain of React Native? Let us help you make an informed decision. Contact us today.