Why Developers Like React Native in 2022

For the past three years, I’ve been developing React Native apps, and in this post, I’ll explain why developers prefer React Native and why it’s still relevant in 2021. You should take this article with a grain of salt because it is my own perspective based on my React Native experience. Other frameworks and alternatives are available, but they are outside the scope of this article.

It was a completely different environment in 2016 when I first started writing React Native apps than it is now. Everything was fresh, things were in a state of flux, and there were lots of issues. However, React Native has progressed significantly in recent years, and it now offers one of the best developer experiences for creating cross-platform projects.

1. Code In JavaScript

The fact that your entire project is written in JavaScript is the most appealing aspect of React Native. For a developer, this is a strong selling point. For several years, JavaScript has been consistently ranked as one of the most widely used and popular programming languages. This implies that if you know JavaScript, you’ll be able to pick up React Native quickly. Web developers can use their existing JavaScript skills to create mobile apps.

2. Uses React

React Native uses React to create native mobile apps, as the names suggest. This is the second most significant benefit of adopting React Native for mobile development. React is still the most widely used JavaScript library for creating front-end apps. It’s only natural for you to choose React Native for designing mobile apps if you’re already a React developer or have a team of React developers. The learning curve is extremely small at this point. This also means that React Native includes all of React’s most recent features.

3. Backed by Facebook

Despite the fact that React Native was open-sourced in 2015, Facebook continues to support it. A group of developers is working to improve React Native. Last year, the React Native team published the Hermes Engine, which re-architected key basic sections of React Native. Hermes is an open-source JavaScript engine for Android that specializes in running React Native apps. This significantly improves React Native’s speed on Android.

These initiatives have all come from the Facebook team, given the high level of community trust. Many of Facebook’s products also use React Native. React Native is used to code the Marketplace in the Facebook app, among other things.

4. Superior Developer Experience

Over the years, the amount of developer experience with React Native has skyrocketed. The following are some of the React Native tools and features that have helped me in having a fantastic developer experience:

React Native Debugger

React Native Debugger is a fantastic standalone debugging tool for React Native apps. It also comes with React Inspector and Redux Dev tools out of the box. This tool provides a considerably better debugging experience than standard Chrome debugging. If you’re building React Native apps, I highly recommend it.

Expo

Expo has helped significantly to the improvement and usability of React Native for developers. Expo allows you to create React Native apps without touching any native code. It’s a React Native wrapper that lets you build apps without having to worry about native code or tools like Xcode and Android Studio. This is ideal for those who have never worked on a mobile device before. Expo provides a lot of APIs to help with the development of your project.

Expo is the quickest method to create a React Native app while still offering a fantastic development experience.

Fast Refresh

Fast Refresh is a React Native feature that gives you near-instant feedback when your React components update. It is enabled by default, but you can turn it off in the React Native developer menu by toggling “Enable Fast Refresh.” Most edits should be visible within a second or two if Fast Refresh is enabled. This significantly accelerates the development process.

5. Code Once — Build iOS and Android Native Apps

The cross-platform capabilities of React Native are the framework’s major selling point.

To make mobile apps with React Native, you don’t need to know Objective-C, Swift, Java, or Kotlin. You can develop a cross-platform program using Javascript and JSX. From my experience, Almost all of the code is shared between iOS and Android. With modest adjustments to improve the end product on both platforms.
That’s fantastic, isn’t it? To cross-platform support the same software, you don’t need to have multiple teams or codebases.

Instead, you have a single team and codebase that works on both iOS and Android. This is a significant win for small businesses, as well as a money and time saver.

Furthermore, the apps you create are native apps, not online apps. The core widgets in React Native are completely native components, providing a seamless experience for the user. In comparison to some of its competitors that create web views, this makes a significant difference.

6. Excellent Community

React Native has grown in popularity over the last several years to the point where many developers are working to improve it on a daily basis. The open-source React Native GitHub project has almost two thousand active contributors. For an open-source project, this is a huge quantity. React Native is an integral part of the React ecosystem. Unless the subject is highly specialized to React Native, the majority of queries may usually be answered by the general React community.

There’s also the React Native Community repo, which contains more than 70 repositories. These contain a number of important projects and tools that aren’t included in the basic React Native repo but are beneficial in your React Native app.

Another place with a lot of materials and queries about React Native is Stack Overflow.

Expo, which has been a major player in the React Native ecosystem, must be mentioned. I would recommend Expo for your app if you wanted the best development experience with React Native. This eliminates the need for any native coding on your end.

The community as a whole is huge and growing. Many difficulties have been solved before, and you won’t be reinventing the wheel during your development experience.

Resources

In the world of mobile development, this is an exciting time. We’re abandoning native development for iOS and Android in front of newer technologies that allow us to create cross-platform mobile apps. I believe that 2021 will be a great year for React Native, as the library attracts more developers.

If you are looking to learn React Native in depth, I highly recommend Mosh’s React Native course.

Ultimate React Native Course — Code With Mosh

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