Why should you seriously consider React Native for your mobile app?
As a software development company, we receive a lot of enquiries about mobile apps.
We still get clients asking us to build native apps as a requirement using the good old Objective-C/Swift and Java for Android. Don’t get me wrong this approach is great however, you will need a decent budget to manage at least 2 developers to build your app for both Android and iOS. Of course, it is not impossible to find a developer who has both skills but it is extremely rare to find on the market. And don’t forget to cater for managing both of them and briefing them on features, etc. Each features will essentially need to be coded twice which is why a lot of people have turned to hybrid solutions to cut down on costs.
If you haven’t heard of hybrid apps before, this simply means you build one app for all devices. This approach has obvious disadvantages (slow, responsiveness, limitations, etc) and it’s been a matter of debate for years now but this is not the topic of today.
Now, let’s move forward and say you have built your app natively and launched it. A few weeks/months later, you require updates/fix bugs (which is normal, your app will evolve with your business). You will need to contact at least 2 developers to do it, more headaches, more testing involved on both devices, etc. You can see how this approach can become quite difficult, expensive and counter-productive.
These days are now over with React Native.
React Native was created by Facebook in 2015. Initially created for their own apps, they decided to release it to the public (Alleluiah!). At the beginning, iOS was the only platform supported but, in December 2015, they announced the support of Android which was a game changer in the mobile app industry. With React Native, you could now have native apps for Android & iOS with 1 codebase, this was ground-breaking. You don’t need to have an army of developers anymore and it is all built using Javascript.
Key benefits about React Native
- 1 codebase for all
- Native apps, not hybrid!
- Cheaper maintenance cost
- A huge community, built & backed by Facebook! If Facebook uses it for their own app, you can be sure it is rock solid.
- The big guys are using it so it must be doing something right.
Disadvantages of React Native
- It is not fully native so there will be a trade off in terms of performance however it is almost impossible to notice from the customer side.
- If your app requires integrating with low-level device features, then using Objective-C/Java is most likely going to be more appropriate or you will need to bridge your own components from Xcode to React Native.
