An app in 24 hours: My React Native Experience
Spoiler!: I decided to open source the app on Github
I’ve been an iOS developer for almost 6years now and I can vividly remember the days I vehemently opposed any other language that didn’t come from 1 infinity loop (Apple). Well, those days are long gone and I’ve picked up a few programming languages in the process, the latest being React Native. This is my story.
I learnt of RN a while back but I was always "too busy” to try it out. January 2017 came with all the fanfare and new year resolutions, and one of mine was to at least write an app with ReactNative or at least try out a new language.
Before I embarked on my own project, I took about two weeks (too long basically) reading online material and looking at example projects (Sam Okoro has some awesome examples here) . I also played around with a few concepts. Here is a news feed and a login form I created, and read the online docs
Project №1: Life in the UK Test App
I chose to create an exam/quiz app as I already had the designs, also it’s something I am currently studying for (Damn you UK Immigration!). I am working with a colleague to see this app through, it’s about half way done at the moment and its perhaps the most basic but useful app I’ve built in a while.
Project №2: Urban Dictionary
At this point I had learnt a few neat tricks with RN and I was no longer stumped by the error messages and bugs(looking at you flex & layout api).
I picked an app that I had been working on before (In Swift). This was a different kind of project, I’d set 8 hours to finish the core bit of the app. I started this work at 6pm on Thursday, and by Friday evening I was done. During this period, I also worked for about 7 hours for The Week (my work at Dennis Publishing) luckily I was working from home and managed to get my work done without the usual time wasting commute and after work merry making.
In total, I spent about 8 hours on the core bit of the app that included pulling in data from the API and displaying it, and another 8–10 hours on UI and debugging issues.
For the final edition, I cut out some features and skimped on others e.g the menu bar, up/down vote animate and most importantly voice search.
It was a fun little project and I̶ ̶a̶m̶ ̶c̶u̶r̶r̶e̶n̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶d̶e̶b̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶w̶e̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶-̶s̶o̶u̶r̶c̶e̶ it’s currently available on github so that others can learn from it and/or to publish it to the app store.
React Native is an awesome JS framework for building apps, I’ve leveraged the framework’s capability of building cross platform apps leading to my first fully featured android app as well 🙌🏾.
RN works great for really basic apps, which make up a HUGE percentage of the apps available on the app store. For other big hitters like games or vastly interactive and customised apps, sticking to native languages like Swift/Objective-c or Java will be your best bet.
I’ll definitely be using RN more and more and see where it takes me in 2017.
✌🏾
- This project is now open sourced on Github
- Urban dictionary app was rejected by Apple for being too similar to existing apps. 🤷🏽
