Natives React to the future !

Victor Torres
5 min readJan 7, 2021
Either catch up or get left behind

React Native , an open source mobile application framework created by Facebook in 2015!(If you're reading this in the year of publication that is only 6 years ago.. and although i would like to say it is a very long time, it is not. It is used to develop applications for Android, Android TV, iOS, macOS, tvOS, Web, Windows and UWP.

Native Development for Everyone

Should be React Native… not taco

React Native can help you build a native application without having to understand things like Objective-C, JavaScript, Kotlin or Swift. With some knowledge on JS you can create actual native apps for Android and IOS without learning the specific languages. The big tech heads such a Tesla, shopiffy, Airbnb, Samsung, and many others are dedicated to creating and the progression of React Native as well as contributing to the community surrounding it. Although there seems to be somewhat of a split towards React Native, it comes down to you either hate it or love it.

Easy setup and configuration

The process of setting up to use the new framework usually takes time. It requires lots of configuration of software installations.

The getting started guide of the React Native project assumes that you the developer already have all the required setup for developing for iOS and Android. The documentation directly jumps to the step of creating a new project. A new React Native project can be created and run on iOS simulator using the following commands:

Not the greatest and not much to it.

Pros to React Native

React Native is gaining lots of popularity, and with so many companies old and new attempting to implement it into their apps people are rushing toward it and this is where the love for it grow.

Native saves you from Errors

React Native come with a smart system to monitor errors that comprise the ability to track errors, and to show a message or an attempt to recover. That system is extremely efficient for taking care of exceptions that weren’t caught previously. This was the one for me. Errors, bugs whatever you want to call them are never ending. Obviously it wont point out the specific error and give you a step by step guide on how to solve them. It'll let you see what the app was doing when the error occurred. User interactions, device state, network calls, ect.

Here for each other

Community

The growing community around react native is huge and an advantage to those beginning. Being on this page I am going to make a huge assumption and say you've been on StackOverflow at some point in your life. Copying and pasting the error you cant seem to wrap your head around, following a rabbit hole and ending up with far more questions than you had before. By using StackOverflow you can see more than 92K questions related to React Native. GitHub also displays steady growth of the open-source projects that utilize React Native

React Native is obviously not the only framework out. Two, frameworks attempting to compete with it , are Flutter along with Ionic.

Flutter

Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, Google Fuchsia, and the web from a single codebase. The first version of Flutter was known as codename “Sky” and ran on the Android operating system. I acknowledge flutter was doing well, google is a mountain, you can climb it but cant move it. But i wont go to far into that, we are focusing on the future, however for those of you interested.

Ionic

Ionic is a complete open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development, i will not go too much into it either. Here is a link incase you really want to learn about the past.

React Natives just getting started

As i had mentioned React Native is a relatively new framework released only six years ago ! Updates and bugs and constantly on the way and inevitable. No framework is perfect , and while lots of businesses and crews are using React Native development, those issues have become far more noticeable and there’s a lot more stress in trying to get them resolved. Hence the increase in demand for software engineers able to utilize this framework !The Facebook crew is upgrading React Native so it can resolve a lot of the issues with the framework. They constantly tweet about their progress and issues so follow them ! React Natives just getting started, we can either get with the times or pivot.

IF YOU THINK YOU HAVENT USED AN APP WITH REACT NATIVE THINK AGAIN!

IF you've touched any of these you've used an app with React native :’)

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Victor Torres

Full Stack Software Engineer || Entrepreneur at heart , engineer by training. Comedian in the eyes off my peers.