Understanding navigation in React Native

React Native does not come with a built-in navigation solution. That’s why we worked with a global state and simply switched components while navigating in our example app. While this works technically, it does not provide a great user experience.

Modern navigation solutions include performance optimization, animations, integration in global state management solutions, and much more. Before we dive deep into these solutions, let’s see what navigation looks like on different platforms.

Navigating different platforms

If you open any iOS or Android app, you’ll soon realize that navigation in an app is completely different from navigating the web in a browser. A browser navigates from page to page by replacing the old page with the new one. In addition to that, every page has a URL and can be accessed directly if it’s typed in the browser’s address bar.

In an iOS or Android app, navigation takes the...