After building my first React Native app, I‘m now convinced it‘s the future.

As a full-stack developer, I‘ve had the opportunity to build mobile apps using a wide variety of technologies and frameworks. I‘ve worked with native platforms like Android Studio and Xcode as well as popular cross-platform solutions like Ionic, Xamarin, and Flutter. Each has its own strengths and tradeoffs.

But after completing my first app using React Native, I can confidently say that this framework is in a league of its own. The development experience and end results were unlike anything I‘ve seen before in mobile development.

In this post, I‘ll share my journey building a React Native app, dive into some key data and statistics about the framework, and explain why I believe it‘s the future of mobile development.

Familiar and intuitive for web developers

Having worked extensively with React for web development, picking up React Native felt like a natural extension of my existing skills. The core concepts, component-based architecture, and even much of the syntax are nearly identical between React and React Native.

This familiarity greatly accelerated my learning curve and allowed me to become productive from day one. I was able to dive right in and start building out screens, components, and features without having to spend days or weeks learning a bunch of new concepts.

import React from ‘react‘;
import { Text, View } from ‘react-native‘;

const HelloWorldApp = () => {
  return (
    <View
      style={{
        flex: 1,
        justifyContent: "center",
        alignItems: "center"
      }}>
      <Text>Hello, world!</Text>
    </View>
  )
}
export default HelloWorldApp;

React Native code feels instantly familiar to React web developers. Source: reactnative.dev

Of course, there are some new APIs, components, and platform-specific considerations to learn, especially when integrating with device features like the camera or geolocation. But the core React paradigm remains consistent, and the official docs do a great job of walking you through the specifics.

Streamlined development process

With React Native, I was able to develop features incredibly fast compared to my past experience with native mobile development. The framework offers a number of tools and features that greatly enhance developer productivity.

Live reloading is a game changer that lets you instantly see your code changes reflected in your running app. No need to manually rebuild the entire app after tweaking a style or fixing a bug. And features like hot module replacement take this a step further, preserving your app state across reloads for an even smoother iteration cycle.

React Native also offers a slick debugging experience, letting you inspect your running JavaScript code in the Chrome dev tools just like you would with a web app. You can set breakpoints, inspect component hierarchies, and live edit your code without leaving your browser.

All of these developer-friendly features add up to a highly streamlined workflow that keeps you focused on building great app features, not fighting with your tools or waiting for lengthy rebuild cycles.

Native look and feel without the overhead

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of React Native is that it manages to achieve a truly native look, feel, and performance without the overhead of building separate native codebases for iOS and Android.

Under the hood, React Native components map to real platform UI elements. When you render a <View> or <Text>, those are real native views and text labels, not webviews or imitation components.

The result is an app that is indistinguishable from one built with each platform‘s native SDKs. Smooth animations, platform-specific interaction patterns, and zippy performance are all possible with React Native.

But you get those benefits while still enjoying React component composition, declarative UI APIs, and JavaScript tooling. You‘re writing a single codebase that adapts to each platform, rather than maintaining separate iOS and Android repos.

This is a level of code reuse and unification that other cross-platform solutions have promised for years but never quite delivered in practice. With React Native, it‘s very achievable to have 80-90% of your app logic shared across platforms, with only minimal platform-specific code for UI variations or device feature integrations.

Robust ecosystem and industry adoption

Beyond the core framework itself, I‘ve been continually impressed by the broader React Native ecosystem. For nearly every common mobile development challenge, from state management to data fetching to animations, you can find a mature and well-supported library compatible with React Native.

Major players like Microsoft, Airbnb, Expo, and Software Mansion are all contributing heavily to the React Native open source ecosystem. The core framework and many complementary libraries are being used in production by some of the most popular and highly rated apps on the app stores. And the community itself is highly active, with a constant stream of blog posts, tutorials, and conference talks pushing React Native‘s capabilities forward.

Perhaps most tellingly, adoption of React Native is growing at an incredible pace. Let‘s look at some data that illustrates this:

• React Native is the 14th most starred project of all time on GitHub (source)
• React Native has been used by 42% of developers who use cross-platform frameworks/tools (source)
• The number of React Native apps in the iOS App Store grew 2.4x from 2016 to 2019 (source)
• 11.5% of the top 500 US apps on iOS and Android are built with React Native (source)
• 60% of React Native developers are targeting both iOS and Android (source)
• 75% of React Native developers felt their app was as good as, or better than, a fully native app (source)

All of these data points paint a picture of a framework that is mature, battle-tested, and only gaining steam. As someone who is always looking to build with technologies that have proven staying power and strong industry momentum, React Native checks all the boxes.

A new paradigm for mobile development

Having gone through the experience of building a production-grade React Native app, it‘s clear to me that this framework represents a real paradigm shift for mobile development.

The ability to have a single codebase, written in a widely known language like JavaScript, that produces real native apps is an incredibly powerful concept. It lowers the barrier to entry for web developers looking to target mobile platforms, while also simplifying the process of targeting multiple platforms even for mobile veterans.

And React Native achieves this without sacrificing the end user experience. As both a developer and a user of many React Native apps, I consistently find the experience to be on par with fully native apps. In fact, many of the most popular and successful consumer apps are now built with React Native.

Anecdotally, I‘ve found recruiting React Native developers to be significantly easier than native iOS or Android developers. The overlap with the existing pool of web developers is substantial, and the learning curve for React web devs is quite manageable.

This bodes well for the long term viability and growth of React Native. As more developers flock to the framework and more high-profile companies invest in it, the flywheel will keep accelerating. We‘re still in the relatively early stages, and I believe React Native will only increase its lead over alternative approaches in the coming years.

Conclusion

After dedicating years to mobile app development across various platforms and technologies, I can unequivocally say that React Native has earned my trust and excitement like no other tool in this space. It marries the best aspects of native development – performance, polish, and deep device integrations – with the reach and ergonomics of web technologies.

Of course, no framework is perfect, and React Native still has room for improvement in areas like package management, navigation solutions, and first-class support for app state persistence. But these are all problems that can and will be solved by the React Native team and community over time.

The core thesis and architecture of React Native is so strong that I believe it‘s here to stay as the dominant cross-platform solution. I‘ve seen it handle everything from simple forms-over-data CRUD apps to rich, highly customized experiences with complex gestures and animations. It‘s not a magic bullet, but its scope of applicability is far wider than any other cross-platform approach I‘ve encountered.

So if you‘re a developer looking to build a mobile app, or an engineering leader evaluating the right approach for your team, I highly recommend giving React Native a serious look. Come see what the hype is all about, I think you‘ll be pleasantly surprised. Happy coding!