Why and When to Use ReactNative

Not every framework will help you with your challenges. And it’s okay. It’s how the IT life works: gives you features to make a product from them. 

ReactNative: Shortly but Clearly

ReactNative is actually easy to learn for developers’ framework. However, all its power can be achieved only if you deeply understand the platforms of iOS and Android – so you need several years of experience in mobile development. We can say that it is exactly the reason why some companies are trying to involve more native developers to make apps with React Native. In addition to React Native itself, they need to learn about several levels of web technology. 

If you consider using React Native, make sure that you have resources for the round-up of your developers. You may need to create special guides, clearly identify best practices, methods for dealing with certain bugs and bugs, regularly involve web developers to help, and develop your own tools to simplify the development process. 

Why Would you Consider ReactNative?

In short, the main advantage of React Native is speed. On average, the team spent less time getting to know the engineers, delivering more code (there is hope that this will increase productivity in the future) and new features compared to native languages.

Many factors contributed to such victories, in the following sections we will talk about the most important of them.

Components of ReactNative

Components are composite JavaScript functions that take fixed parameters (called props) and return React elements that describe what should be on the screen. These are the fundamental blocks of any React application. The use of components helps engineers break down the user interface into independent and reusable parts.

To rewrite the registration in the application, the team has previously created a set of form components (buttons, input fields), text elements (headings, paragraphs of text), markup elements (screens, delimiters) and more complex UI elements (components for date selection, progress indicators, modal windows). Except for the data entry component, everything was written in TypeScript.

Most of the main components were created in the initial stages of the project. Such reusable elements helped engineers create the interface faster, as the markup became more declarative.

In addition, the encapsulation of components often allowed to parallelize the work of engineers on different parts of the application. This greatly contributed to the efficiency of development.

Migration with codes in ReactNative

The main part of the registration in the Coinbase application was written in TypeScript, which works on iOS and Android devices “out of the box”. Although there is an exception because you need to write your own native module to get the benefits of the native iOS calendar. Even with such extra effort, the team expects a speed advantage of 95% from the shared code. So some additional settings for native platforms are quite justified.

TypeScript

TypeScript is a typed programming language compiled in JavaScript. It is often used to develop applications on React Native and has the same power as Swift and Kotlin.

Although TypeScript does not have a very low entry threshold, it makes it difficult to write code (compared to vanilla JavaScript), and the security benefits, IDE features, and code support are worth it. Without standardized abstraction over JavaScript, most of the framework level changes required in a project would be much more complex and error-prone. Given that the release of updates in mobile applications is slower than on the web, the typed language adds confidence.

Issues with ReactNative for the Team

Although the experience of using React Native was generally positive, it was not without its difficulties. In the following sections, we will discuss the challenges facing the team, the React-Native learning curve for native mobile developers, the difficulty of targeting multiple platforms, and the challenges of new technologies.