Why should you develop mobile apps with React Native?

Today’s digital arena is driven by rapid development and faster information delivery. Every mobile user expects to get a service or information at the swipe of a finger. That’s why almost every business tries hard to provide the best mobile experience to its target audience.

This unprecedented demand for quality mobile experience has facilitated the evolution and development of many mobile application frameworks. 

Among these, React Native is one of the most popular mobile app development frameworks. It is open source and made by Facebook in 2013, today, React Native has control over 38% of the mobile app development market.

We can build mobile apps for both Android and iOS with this app development framework. This capability gives businesses the economic benefits of maintaining a single code base for both versions of their apps.

Here we explore why you should develop mobile apps with React Native, but first, let’s take an overview of this framework.

An overview of React Native

Reactive Native is an open-source framework based on JavaScript. The framework follows a set of declarative programming paradigms for building native mobile applications for Android and iOS platforms.

One of the contributing factors to the popularity of Reactive Native is that Facebook successfully merged the best parts of native development and React (the top-level JavaScript library they created) in this framework. As it uses JavaScript as the core programming language for building applications, it reduces development time and improves the application’s performance across platforms.

App developers are no longer restricted to Swift/Objective C for iOS development or Java for Android applications. React Native helps them overcome these requirements and create fully functional cross-platform applications.

From a business perspective, it is much more cost-efficient to develop applications with Reactive Native as a single code base needs to be created and maintained. There is no need to hire two teams of developers.

Reasons to use React Native for app development 

1. Code reusability

Single code base results in code reusability to create applications for both Android and iOS platforms. As React Native uses JavaScript, the capability to reuse the same code increases. It results in efficiency and faster delivery of the product. It also results in significant cost reduction.

React Native also benefits from the availability of hundreds of open-source JavaScript libraries that can be used to create user interfaces for mobile applications. This considerably speeds up the development process. Companies can accelerate the app development process by creating reusable code modules that they can use between multiple mobile applications.

2. Easy availability of JavaScript resources

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages used in almost every web development project. React Native uses JavaScript, so you do not need additional developers to work on mobile applications. Furthermore, hundreds and thousands of open-source JavaScript libraries allow adding features to applications quickly without writing code from scratch.

Even if your team is unfamiliar with React Native framework, their prior knowledge of JavaScript or React is enough to get started. This platform is comparatively easier to learn and has several open-source libraries to import mobile components.

3. Hot and live reloading

React Native offers hot and live reloading features out of the box. In simple terms, these features allow app developers to work on core changes in real-time without restarting the application. You can make relevant fixes or add new features to the live application.

The live reloading feature of this framework reloads the entire application after any changes, while the hot reloading feature reloads the specific section to which the change occurred.

These React Native framework features significantly improve the testing and development process. When you don’t have to restart or reload the application every time a change is made, the app development process becomes much more efficient, faster, and intuitive.

4. High-performance applications

React Native employs a simplified binding strategy for its code. It implies that to change any particular object in the code base, the developer has to modify its state before applying updates. It helps ensure that the app is reliable and stable after updates. React Native produces the most durable and high-performing applications compared to any other cross-platform development framework.

This capability makes React Native suitable for small-scale and enterprise-level mobile applications.

Conclusion 

React Native is one of the best frameworks for creating cross-platform apps due to its unique benefits for mobile application development. Its dependency on JavaScript allows developers to develop native app experience in their mobile applications without using platform-specific programming languages such as Java for Android or Objective C++ for iOS.

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