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Taylor Milliman · · 5 min readAfter building my first React Native app, I’m now convinced it’s the future
Screenshots from the current version of my app.
After a few weeks of playing around with React Native, I came up with my first real mobile app. It’s fairly simple, taking me only few days to build, and I had a blast doing it.
I created a mobile app for my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen. The app allows users to search through a database of over 1,000 recipes and concisely view the necessary ingredients and directions for each one. They can also bookmark recipes and easily share them with a friend.
Note that I’m still waiting for permission from the blog to publish this app. In the meantime, I’m keeping the code closed source.
React Native isn’t going away any time soon
A common reservation among developers is that they don’t want to invest time in learning a new technology if there’s a strong chance it will soon become obsolete.
But from my relatively minimal experience with React Native, I’ve found it to be an enormously powerful tool and I am confident it will be used in the years to come.
Facebook, Instagram, and Airbnb all built the latest versions of their mobile apps using React Native. There are also other popular apps that were built on it.
Jeff Meyerson, creator of the podcast Software Engineering Daily, has talked extensively about React Native. He believes it will survive and continue to capture the majority of the mobile ecosystem. He has even speculated that Facebook may be creating their own mobile phone, which would be built specifically to support apps made with React Native.
How React Native is different from other cross-platform tools
If you’re new to React Native, it’s an open source project started by Facebook. It allows developers to build cross-platform mobile apps using JavaScript. It works very similarly to React, Facebook’s popular JavaScript library for building single-page web applications.
I’ve always been skeptical of tools that advertise themselves as cross-platform for mobile. All too often, you end up with a look, feel, and performance that don’t quite match the native platform.
React Native is not like other mobile app development frameworks such as Ionic or Cordova that run inside of a web view, an “HTML5 app,” or a “hybrid app.”
How to get started
Styling in React Native
in your next web app.Navigation
Developer experience matters
React Native makes mobile development fun again, and that alone is enough reason to try it out for your next project.
Be willing to explore
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