How I met React Native
Have you ever been developing an app for both platforms?
A single person doesn’t usually develop for both iOS and Android, the skills required are in-fact various and the amount of work required is very high.
You will probably need to collaborate with another developer in order to release the app for both platforms and respect the time to market.
In my case I used to develop native iOS apps and I didn’t know almost anything about Android app development, luckily I knew an Android developer and with his help we delivered many apps for both platforms.
For every single app we had to develop two separate projects, the only common part was the design.
As you can imagine different projects = different bugs 🐛🐞 furthermore an update to the app translates in an update to both projects so the workload is always doubled.
REDUNDANCY² => Not a maintainable solution for a company.
We had to find a solution to solve the redundancy problem.
We did some brainstorming and we ended up thinking about shifting up to another programming level placed above Android and iOS environments.
After some research we discovered a lot of cross-platform frameworks: Xamarin, Ionic, Flutter, Adobe PhoneGap etc. but none of them seemed to be right for us.
The result of using one of those tools was an app with laggy animations and an overall bad user experience (except for Flutter but that one is still quite immature).
We wanted to improve our flow with zero compromises.
We then found out a framework named React Native that was exactly what we needed, a simple, centralized and less redundant way to develop native apps.
With React Native you get:
- Excellent performance
- Fluid animations
- You can develop your own native components for iOS and Android and wrap them in a React Native components “How cool is that?”
- Awesome reusable components
- Lots of features to discover
We’ve been using React Native in real projects and found out it’s stable and reliable even though it is constantly being updated and improved.
Tips:
- You can simply learn to program in React Native but as i said before, one of the coolest part is that you can develop your own native components and to do that you need to know iOS and Android development.
- React Native is performant but you need to really know what you’re doing, expecially with animations, more info.
Who we are?
We are a team of young developers and designers based in Padua, Italy.
We make mobile applications and websites, and we are always ready to create something great!
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Are you interested on what we do? Drop us a few lines!
