Quick Guide to React Native for Mobile App Development

• By Johany Wick
• 01-08-2024
• Mobile App Development

Mobile devices with business applications have become the most preferred channel for users to connect with businesses. No matter which industry you and your business belong to, today’s digitally savvy users look for the convenience of quick access to information, real-time payment transfers or money transactions, communications, and you just name it. Henceforth, mobile apps hold great significance among people of all walks of life.

It signifies the importance of having mobile apps for your business. Henceforth, you must consider developing one if you haven’t had one. If you already have web apps, you should step up, build one, and provide your users with a better, faster, and more interactive business experience with your mobile apps. Today, react native is considered the most preferred choice for developing interactive user interfaces for mobile apps. In this guide to using react native for mobile app development services, we will be discussing reasons why React is still relevant, its importance, use cases in different industries, and key advantages.

Why is React Native the best choice for mobile app development?

React Native is an open-source frontend development framework that uses JavaScript and React to develop cross-platform mobile apps. The framework is one of the widely used front-end development tools supporting MVP projects for enterprise as well as startup requirements. As every business wants to launch the business mobile app quickly to the market, the cross-platform capability of react native allows businesses to save time in app development by eliminating the need to create separate codebases for different platforms. Since iOS and Android are the two most prominent operating systems and platforms, React Native App Development Solutions allows businesses to convert their business idea into feasible mobile apps and make them run on both Android and iOS platforms with a single code base.

React Native makes developing mobile apps efficient by offering a basic set of components that work seamlessly on both iOS and Android platforms. It uses native iOS UIKit and Android UI components internally and ensures high performance and a native look and feel for the developed apps. Using a single codebase for both platforms, react native also reduces development time and costs. Components like Navigator, TabBar, Text, TextInput, View, and ScrollView simplify the development process, making it easier to create robust, cross-platform applications efficiently.

Is React Native Still Relevant in 2024?

React Native continues to evolve and make significant strides in 2024. Despite increasing competition from tools like Flutter, Jetpack Compose, and .NET MAUI, React Native App Development Solutions remains relevant by improving the developer and user experience. Economic factors are driving more companies to adopt cost-saving multi-platform solutions, allowing them to consolidate their iOS, Android, and sometimes web teams into unified groups capable of addressing comprehensive business objectives. The adoption of new architectures and features like Fabric, TurboModule, Expo, and Static Hermes highlights the community’s trust and reliance on React Native’s capabilities, ensuring its place in the cross-platform development landscape. Let’s explore how react native is still relevant in 2024.

1. Enhanced Performance: The new architecture of react native, featuring Fabric and TurboModule, significantly enhances performance and predictability by enabling more efficient communication between JavaScript and native threads. While adoption has been slow due to migration challenges, its benefits are driving gradual integration.

2. Standard Libraries: The adoption of Skia and Reanimated as standard libraries for React Native projects has streamlined complex animations and improved performance. Skia, a 2D graphics library, and Reanimated, an animation library, collectively enhance the visual and functional capabilities of applications.

3. Expo Ecosystem: Expo has evolved to become the go-to toolkit for React Native, simplifying development processes. It bridges skill gaps by providing a comprehensive set of tools and services, making it easier for developers to build, deploy, and maintain apps efficiently.

4. React 19 Enhancements: The introduction of a compiler in React 19 for automatic optimization has revolutionized performance management. This compiler reduces unnecessary re-rendering, making applications faster and more responsive, which is crucial for user experience.

5. Code Sharing with React Strict DOM: React Strict DOM enables seamless code sharing between web and native platforms, simplifying cross-platform development. This evolution reduces the redundancy of writing separate codebases, making development more efficient and streamlined.

6. Improved Event Loop: Aligning event loop processing across platforms has led to more deterministic behavior and better performance. This improvement ensures that applications run more smoothly and consistently, providing a better user experience across different devices.

7. Static Hermes: The transition to Static Hermes, which compiles JavaScript into native machine code ahead of time, has significantly improved startup times and memory efficiency. This pre-compilation process means that applications start faster and use resources more effectively.

These advancements ensure that React Native remains a robust and relevant framework for cross-platform development, capable of meeting the evolving needs of developers and users in 2024 and beyond.

Types of business applications best fit for react native app development

Since react native supports component-based architecture and comes with several pre-built and customized components, mobile apps with different business use cases, functions, and functionalities can be developed with the framework. The built-in components, such as text, images, and views, set the fundamental building block for developing highly responsive and sophisticated user interfaces for different business apps such as eCommerce, social media, and others.

Let’s explore varied use cases of different industries and understand how react native solve the specific needs of businesses with interactive mobile app development.

1. E-commerce Applications

Using React Native App Development Services, you can develop different eCommerce applications such as product listings, shopping carts, user review modules, payment gateway platforms, and order tracking. React Native’s performance optimizations ensure that these applications render efficiently without disrupting the user experience on any platform, be it iOS or Android.

2. Social Media Applications

Social media app components such as user profiles, news feeds, messaging, notifications, media sharing, and others can be easily developed with react native using its UI building blocks. The framework simplifies the methodology of building these components to support real-time updates of newsfeeds and timelines without interrupting the user experience on any version of the device or platform.

3. Marketplace Applications

Just like Facebook ad managers manage user experience on the Facebook mobile screen due to React Native’s ability to handle information presentation and integration with the infrastructure, one can also develop the front end of marketplace applications with React Native. It allows you to customize product listings, establish real-time buyer-seller communication, provide multivendor support, and integrate payments.

4. Finance and Banking Applications

Finance and banking are yet another fastest-growing industry, and people worldwide expect to experience digital interactions on mobile devices. React native development company with experience in the domain can enable you to develop solutions such as account management, bill payments, financial analytics, and transaction history presentation efficiently with security and responsive user interface.

5. Healthcare Applications

React Native framework helps develop healthcare applications, including appointment booking, telemedicine, health monitoring, electronic health records, and others, while supporting cross-platform requirements. React native further supports requirements like integration with wearable devices allowing health tech organization innovate efficiently and make products faster to the market.

6. On-Demand Service Applications

On-demand service applications is one such industry where everyday new applications are being launch to solve gaps in on-demand service apps. As react native help in quickly transforming an app idea into a feasible product, entrepreneurs can jump on developing on-demand apps such as service booking, real-time tracking, user reviews, and payment processing.

7. Education and E-Learning Applications

As react native is supported by multiple libraries, several e-learning apps can be developed using the framework, and content management can be handled, such as course materials, video lectures, quizzes, and interactive sessions. The react-native-video library extends the react native's ability to handle video playback capabilities in iOS and Android apps. As the library supports a range of video formats and offers features such as playback control, you get control and the ability to create custom controls and interactions and features such as adaptive bitrate streaming.

Key Benefits A Business Experience When Using React Native As Frontend Development

1. Can Develop Mobile Apps faster and reduce development cost

The concept of developing native apps is great in theory, but practically, what does matters for a business is productivity, code sharing, time-to-market, developer's availability, app development cost, and others. In these scenarios, going with a cross-platform framework and services such as React Native App Development Services not only solves all the problems but also provides the ability to build and maintain your own apps.

2. Achieve native-like experience and speed as fast as native apps

React Native is a by-product of React and hence uses the React javascript library to design quick and reactive app interfaces. Leveraging the advantage of the react javascript library provides excellent rendering capabilities and enables developers to develop mobile apps according to a component-based model that aligns the creation of both uncomplicated and intricate UI designs.

3. Bunch of Plugins and Libraries Ensures Developer's Efficiency

When a React native app development company develops React native mobile apps, a user doesn't get to experience any difference between React native and other apps. JavaScript interacts with the native environment and allows React native UI to appear and operate in a manner that is native to its platform. React native also comes with third-party plugins, including JavaScript-based options, native modules, and third-party plugins, enabling developers to create web view functions and aid in improving the app's functionality and performance. Extensive libraries such as Mocha, Chai, Jest, Enzyme, and others help in writing code free of bugs and support faster development.

4. Flexibility, Adaptability, and Versatility

React native-based app development processes don't slow down, including when you shuffle your team structure. The module and intuitive interface of react native enable developers to jump in and start from where someone else has left off and keep moving and working with the requirements. This process and approach provide the flexibility a software development team always wanted to improve their productivity. This level of flexibility with the framework also facilitates developers to perform updates and upgrades of the mobile app while allowing testers the ability to generate test scenarios.

Moreover, developers can easily choose the required and preferred toolbox to work with react native instead of working from scratch if the framework changes. They can simply transfer the app from react native to Android Studio or Xcode and begin working. This makes up a significant advantage of utilizing React Native for mobile app development and bolsters its versatility.

5. A Small Team Could Easily Handle Native Mobile App Development and Performance

Mobile app development requires setting up two separate native teams (iOS and Android). A React native app development company provides you with skilled React native app developers, along with Android and iOS developers, to reduce the communication gap that often hinders the app development process. React native developers with experience in coding for both platforms can lead the app development by supporting the high native features, and if and when required, team size can be easily scaled up and down and managed in most cases.

Case Studies/Success Stories

Lakeshore Learning Materials, a renowned provider of student learning resources in the USA with nearly 50 years of experience, recognized the need to adapt to the digital age's mobile-centric consumer behavior. Initially, their robust website facilitated product displays and online shopping, but the company saw the potential to explore new revenue streams through mobile applications. To achieve this, Lakeshore partnered with Successive Digital for comprehensive application development consulting and enablement. Understanding their user segment, Lakeshore initially focused on the iOS platform to gauge market response.

Successive Digital, leveraging its expertise in React Native, developed an intuitive and interactive iOS app that quickly garnered thousands of downloads and led to a remarkable 100% increase in sales. Encouraged by this success, Lakeshore decided to capitalize on React Native's cross-platform capabilities and developed an Android application, which also received an enthusiastic response and significantly boosted revenue. Building on these insights, Successive Digital further optimized Lakeshore’s website to enhance the online shopping experience for both existing and new customers. This strategic digital transformation enabled Lakeshore to meet the evolving needs of its mobile-first audience while driving substantial business growth.

Conclusion

Including Lakeshore, react native is even still the top choice among Meta as the company is continually using this cross-platform app development framework within the company's product ecosystem right, from the Facebook marketplace, messenger desktop, and Ads Manager to many others. Microsoft, Amazon, Shopify, and other Fortune 500 companies in the league are utilizing react native to build modern mobile apps and functionalities. If you have a breakthrough business idea, you must connect with a professional React native app development company that is experienced, skilled, and has a great deal of experience handling React native project development from initializing to project execution to ensure the desired outcome. A professional company enables you to leverage all the advantages of developing a native-like mobile application, such as faster go-to-market, cost saving, seamless maintenance of the app, sharing coding, and much more.