React Native Meetup Bangalore — August 2017

Recently we organised our 5th React Native Meetup at the office of Quicken. The event was quite a success and was attended by many React Native enthusiasts and others who wanted to learn about React Native.

A big shout-out to Quicken for hosting this Meetup at their office. We thank Manohar Simons for his constant inputs and interaction with us.

How It All Started!

The original React Native Bangalore Meetup group was started by people from Deco Software, which was a San Francisco based company best known for creating Deco which is an open-source IDE useful for building React Native Apps.

In September 2016, Sanket Sahu with Nadine and Devin from Deco organized the 1st React Native Meetup!

Then soon after Deco software was acquired by Airbnb, they stopped supporting the Meetup group.

This is when we at GeekyAnts stepped up and took charge of the group.

Since then, we are proud to say that this group has grown to more than 1,800 members.

About Quicken

Quicken is a personal money management software which was developed by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx in 1984 under Intuit Inc. By 1988, Quicken became the #1 selling consumer software and till this day remains at the top with over 2 million active users!

In 2016, Quicken separated itself from Intuit and has grown into a multinational company, with its HQ in Menlo Park and a Product Development Center here in Bangalore.

At present, Quicken has two main products: one for Mac and another for Windows. There is also an iOS and an Android app of Quicken, but it operates only as a companion for the desktop products.

Using React Native, Quicken hopes to build the next-gen mobile apps that can work independently and in conjunction with the desktop products.

Building and Engaging Mobile Apps Using React Native

Balchander V R and Manohar Simons from the Quicken team spoke about the importance of keeping the users engaged with an app.

Elements of Engaging Apps:

1. An app’s success depends on how useful it is to the user. Uber, Facebook and Paytm are successful because they have proved to be more useful than other similar apps. Uber helps the user commute. Facebook helps the user connect with the world and Paytm has improved the online payment system in India. Paytm also proved to be helpful during the demonetization crisis.
2. Apps that have a compelling design last longer. Apps like Instagram and Airbnb are built in React Native and a prime example of this point.
3. The user will want to use an app that gives meaningful and accurate information. Google Maps helps the user plan his commute by providing important information like traffic details. Penny tracks your finances and helps you spend smarter and save more money.
4. The app that you are building should be able to integrate various sensor available on your smartphone and it should only integrate with the ones that are relevant to the app’s functionality. A music app like Gaana has no business integrating with the GPS or with the Camera.

Manohar and Balchander also demonstrated the working of a fingerprint scanning app using the react native fingerprint scanner library.

Shortcomings of React Native:

React Native is growing very fast. While this may be seen as a good thing but it also means that there is a new upgrade every 2 weeks, which makes it difficult for a developer to keep up with the advancements.

When you try to render animations at 60fps in React native, you start facing problems.

Building an Android app on React Native is more difficult than building an iOS app.

Live Coding a Polling App in React, React Native and Firebase

Jasbir Singh, Akshay Mathur, and Ankit Singhania from GeekyAnts conducted a Live Coding session during which they built a polling app.

This app used UI components that were taken from NativeBase.

Development time can be reduced if you have already created code snippets.

Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud hosted NoSQL database. It was used here to store and sync data that was gathered from the poll app.

Panel Discussion

The Panel discussion proved to be the highlight of the event.

Arrival of Google Flutter

Sanket and Akshay spoke about Google Flutter. While Sanket is looking forward to trying out Google Flutter, Akshay was more concerned that Flutter is based on Dart, which is not a well-known programming language.

Redux and Mobx

Jasbir spoke about Redux and it’s ridiculous complexity. Sanket backed Jasbir by talking about how he switched to Mobx when apps using Redux started to fail.

Separation of Presentation and Container layers

When asked about the importance of separating the presentation and container layers, Manohar stated that it depends on the platform that the developer’s app is going to work on. Further, separating presentation and container is not that important for mobile apps. If the data needs to be persistent, then the separation is more important.

Best Pre-processor: elm or ReasonML

Regarding the best pre-processors, Sanket suggested elm for functional programming but reasonML wins over elm as it has a better community.

Typescript vs Flow

While Manohar supports Flow, Sanket votes on Typescript as it improved a lot since v2.1, and helps reduce the rate of error. Typescript is also growing at a great speed and it’s tooling is a lot better than what you can find on Flow.

In the end

We had a great time at Quicken. We got to know many amazing devs, some who are just stepping into the React Native world, while others who have been building React Native apps for quite some time.

We are planning to branch out an advanced React Native Meetup group for developers who are well versed with React Native.

We thank everyone who attended this Meetup and look forward to seeing them at the next Meetup as well.

To see the complete event, click on the videos below.

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