After graduating Flatiron School, I’ve been trying to find more things to study to extend my skills. There are so many languages and framworks that people are using to develop web applications. I had to choose which one I’m going to start with. One day, I was at the restaurant with my husband and looked around. Most of people who are in the restaurant are holding a fork in one hand and holding a phone in other hand. People can’t leave their phone even while they are eating! And hence, there comes the REACT Native Development in the picture! Since I loved learning React and still there’s more to learn about it, I decided to move my next step of learning field to React Native.
What is React Native
React Native is an open-source mobile application framework created by Facebook. React is targeting browser but React Native is targeting mobile platforms like iOS and Android. Just like React, React Native applications are written using a mixture of JavaScript and JSX(XML-esque markup). Also the update cycle in React Native is the same as in React: when props or state change, React Native re-renders the views. Therefore, React Native is easier for me to understand with my existing knowledge of React than other libraries. One of differences between React Native and React is that React Native does this by leveraging the UI(user interface) libraries of its host platform, rather than using HTML and CSS. With React Native Framework, you can render UI for both iOS and Android platforms, means, Just code once, and the REACT Native apps are available for both iOS and Android platforms which helps to save development time.
Great examples of React Native app
Facebook wanted to bring all the benefits of web development to mobile.
The development team converted the Events Dashboard feature in the Facebook for iOS app to React Native to test app performance, such as startup time, which is crucial in this kind of applications. It is a significant part of the user’s first impression of the app and determines whether they will stay or leave. What they achieved was cutting time-to-market in half.
I found about their journey here.
Skype
At the beginning of 2017, Skype announced that it’s working on its completely new app, written in React Native. It was pretty good information for all the users, as the fairly well-designed app had suffered from numerous issues. The new version got totally revamped, from the icons to the whole layout, adding a few neat features as well.
Instagram took the challenge to integrate React Native into their existing native app starting from the simplest view you can imagine: the Push Notifications view which was originally implemented as the WebView. It didn’t require building navigation infrastructure, as UI was quite simple.
Read more stories here.
Conclusion
There’s a lot more of big companies that were written in React Native for their mobile apps like Tesla, Walmart and Airbnb etc.. As we see development world is growing so much and fast, there is a lot to learn as a programmer. Even if I already know Javascript or Ruby, the syntaxs and rules are keep changing and updating so I can never just settle with what I’ve learned yesterday. I’m in the new learning field everyday and I should keep it up always to survive in this IT career field.