Handling Gestures in React Native

One of the most important things that makes good apps stand out against bad apps or mobile websites is good gesture handling. While mobile websites only listen to simple clicks in most cases, apps can and should be controlled with different gestures such as short touches, long touches, swipes, pinching to zoom, or touches with multiple fingers. Using these gestures in a very intuitive way is one of the most important things to consider when developing an app.

But it doesn’t stop with just listening to these gestures – you have to give an immediate response to the user so that they can see (and maybe abort) what they are doing. Some gestures need to trigger or control animations and therefore have to play together very well with the animation solutions we learned about in Chapter 6, Working with Animations.

In React Native, there are multiple ways to handle gestures. From simple built-in components to very complex third-party gesture...