Mobile development is undoubtedly one of the core IT fields right now. In one way or another, mobile apps bring some of the largest amounts of profit in the world right now. For example, mobile markets represent the greatest share of the gaming markets.
It’s not surprising that the choice of technology is such a complex task for many companies that want to engage in mobile development. An incorrectly chosen technology can lead an app to failure due to its low level of compatibility with a certain task or even mobile platforms in general. Consequently, you should carefully select which technology will work best on mobile platforms.
In this regard, we have an option that is great in the majority of cases. This option is React Native. It’s a special UI software framework developed by Facebook (Meta) to assist with the creation of cross-platform mobile apps. Let’s review the benefits of using this platform for development tasks and hiring a React Native development company.
1. Ability to reuse code
The first reason to use React Native is code reusability. React Native utilizes a highly unique approach to working with code. Instead of sticking to just one style type as React does (in this case, it uses HTML and its components such as div), React Native provides a platform-agnostic framework for components. For example, you can add one element via React Native syntax, and then, depending on the platform (Android, iOS, or web), it’ll render using the components of that platform. In short, you can write one piece of code and use it across all platforms at the same time. This is the ‘write once, use many times’ model. React, with its focus on HTML and CSS, also enables such functions, but they aren’t this smooth. One can run a website in a container and present it as an app: however, web-based elements rather than platform-specific ones will be used for rendering. React Native, in turn, makes it possible to create apps that look great on all platforms despite using a singular codebase.
2. Ease of use and learning
React Native is also notable for one more important feature. Apart from being platform-agnostic and allowing the development of several versions of an app using a singular code base, it promotes an easy-to-use scripting language, JavaScript. In this respect, this factor is highly vital because JavaScript is one of the most popular languages for development on the web. As Atwood’s law says, if something can be written in JavaScript, it will be written in it at some point. React Native definitely assists in this regard, since it allows web and mobile developers to expand the number of things they can do with JavaScript even further.
Due to being JavaScript-based, React Native is very easy to pick up for many developers. A significant number of people are acquainted with this language. As a result, all they have to do is review some unique approaches to syntax in React Native, which aren’t challenging to grasp, and then port apps to this platform. Most likely, React Native is one of the easiest platforms to learn if you’re willing to create a mobile app that works on both Android and iOS, as well as the web.
3. Access to npm
React Native, utilizing JavaScript, seamlessly integrates with npm, the Node Package Manager originally designed for managing Node.js packages but has since evolved into a vast repository for JavaScript-related tools. This integration allows for the direct installation of React Native, among other packages, enhancing mobile development with a wide range of solutions and add-ons from the npm ecosystem. Developers can leverage this extensive library to include functionalities beyond JavaScript, incorporating connections to languages like C# and C++. Thus, npm significantly broadens the capabilities of React Native and JavaScript development as a whole.
4. Live reload feature
A major positive benefit of React Native is its live reload feature. Usually, when you change some code in an app, you have to completely reload it. With React Native, this isn’t necessary. You can update the look of your app in live mode. This approach saves a lot of time for developers, allowing them to review small transformations without having to do several tedious actions. Since even the smallest features can make or break a mobile app, the live reload framework is a major time saver. It allows testing multiple hypotheses without spending too much time on constant app reloading. The approach also saves time on compilation since one can reload separate parts of an app or site instead of everything. Few programming frameworks offer features that are as good at saving time as this one.
5. Great Community
React Native has a great community that is ready to help its members with aspects such as framework learning or, for example, add-on choice. In this respect, there are many people on the forums who are ready to answer your questions. Moreover, many developers maintain great solutions for various tedious tasks and consistently upload them to platforms like npm. This means that you’ll never be alone in your development questions for React Native. It’s possible to find solutions to almost any development problem due to the active community this platform has. Therefore, it’s among the best platforms if you want to be sure that you’ll receive large-scale support from outside.
Conclusion
All in all, the presented information clearly indicates that React Native is one of the best platforms for mobile development. It allows the creation of cross-platform apps with a minimum amount of effort. Thus, we can highly recommend it if the key goal of your firm is to create a potent mobile app that can simultaneously have multiple versions on different platforms.
