React Native remained the most popular technology for mobile app projects covering all niches. Leading apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, and Salesforce are developed with React Native. Still, the framework has played an instrumental role in cross-platform app projects of startups and small businesses.
According to Statista, React Native framework has become the preferred framework for as many as 35% of developers globally. In more than one way, React Native brought an overwhelming shift of approaches in mobile app development. The popularity seems to be a given for the app development of the future.
Let us have a quick look at some of the key reasons why React Native as technology will continue to hold the same popularity in the years to come.
1. Code-Sharing Advantage
When a business wants to reach wider audiences, it needs to create apps targeting Android and iOS platforms. This translates to two times development time and cost. But by hiring a React developers, you can build and optimize apps for both iOS and Android.
Most app projects choose React Native thanks to its code-sharing ability across iOS and Android. App developers using React Native can share up to 90% of the core codebase across platforms. This reduces up to 50-80% development time and the corresponding cost.
2. Smooth and Easy Maintenance
Every native framework with its growth becomes heavier as it becomes loaded with an increasing number of APIs. This makes it difficult to update and maintain the native apps. Developers lose a lot of time working on the latest tools for each platform. Native app maintenance and updates are time-consuming.
In complete contrast, React Native makes it extremely easy and least time-consuming for app maintenance and updates.
React Native by using the same tooling comprehensively for both the app versions makes the updating and maintenance process faster and easier. Apart from helping developers to roll out updates easily, React Native also cuts down the maintenance cost to a great extent.
3. Reusable Dynamic Components
For the sake of unique branding elements in look, feel, and perception, many apps simply remain ignorant of the OS platform. Incorporating such branding elements is difficult in the case of the Native apps, but the same is quite simple and easy in the case of React Native development.
React Native comes with a load of reusable dynamic components that can be used by both the iOS & Android versions of the app. These dynamic and reusable components also help maintain a consistent app user experience while still delivering native app performance.
4. Consistent and uniform design for all platforms
The best value proposition of React Native is that it is easily compiled to native platforms, and thus, everything in terms of design and look and feel appears as native. This also allows you to alter the design befittingly for each platform.
The same components that native developers use for Android app projects or iOS apps offer their identical equivalent components in React Native. Naturally, by using React Native, developers can deliver a consistent look and feel on both platforms.
React Native offers several popular best-practice libraries, and these libraries can easily adjust behavior to fit the particular OS platforms. Thanks to these ready-to-use libraries, the entire development process becomes faster and streamlined.
Lastly, with React Native, you can always give more credence to design over the platform when needed or give more priority to the platform over the design as per your need.
5. Smooth third-party integrations
React Native is highly modular in character and can easily utilize and integrate various native modules for accessing platform-specific features and device functionalities such as GPS, accelerometer, camera, etc.
This becomes possible because of the internal device programming of React Native. So, developers need to work less hard to integrate features and corresponding modules. Since many of these features are initially represented by a JavaScript library, it becomes easier to unify their code with React Native.
6. Reloading Feature
Hot reloading is one of the most sought-after features of React Native, which plays a key role in making React Native highly popular across app projects of all sizes and niches. The feature allows developers to make changes and make value additions based on user feedback.
The Hot Module Replacement (HMR) feature of React Native allows developers to incorporate a quick source code change and evaluate the results immediately after the changes.
As soon as any change in the code is done, the changed codes are reloaded automatically. This further ensures a speedier and glitch-free development process when advanced tools for debugging such as Flipper and Reactotron are used.
Both reloading and advanced debugging together offer a delightful experience to the app developers.
Conclusion
On top of all these, React Native is indulged in a very ambitious large-scale development project named Fabric. The principal objective is to help React Native developers further with more advanced tools and active aid to blend React Native with all hybrid JavaScript infrastructure.
With so much on offer, there can hardly be any doubt that Reacts Native, as the most sophisticated cross-platform development library, comes with a bright future.
As the number of smartphone users & the number of mobile apps is steadily increasing, the excellent cross-platform development capabilities of React Native will continue to be popular and sought after.
