What Is React Native?

Building high-quality apps for multiple platforms is the holy grail of app development. Since React Native was published, it has been challenged in very competitive environments because it seemed to be this holy grail for a long time. Its performance was much better than the performance of any of the competitors (Ionic, Cordova) back when it was released by Facebook in 2015 and its development speed is much faster than creating separate Android and iOS apps.

Since 2015, a lot has happened regarding React Native. Facebook open sourced the framework, a lot of contributors and even big companies such as Microsoft, Discord, and Shopify invested heavily in React Native, and new competitors such as Flutter of Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile evolved.

In 7 years, a lot of companies migrated their apps to React Native successfully, while others failed in doing so, migrated back to native development, or finally chose other multiplatform technologies.

In 2022, React Native is used in more products than ever and it has become a lot more developer friendly than in the early days. It is not only available for iOS and Android but also for macOS, Windows, web, VR, and other platforms. Most importantly, and despite many rumours claiming otherwise, Facebook is still betting heavily on React Native.

The React Native core team at Facebook just completed a rewrite of more than 1,000 React Native screens in its main application, including Dating, Jobs, and Marketplace, which is visited by more than 1 billion users each month. This means React Native powers important and business-critical parts of the biggest and most used app in the world, which is the ultimate proof of it being a stable and supported framework.

As you can see, React Native has become very powerful and is widely used. But you have to know how to leverage its strengths and how to deal with its weaknesses to create a high-quality app and a well-run software product. This book contains learnings, best practices, and basic architectural and processual concepts you need to know about to be able to decide on the following things:

• When to use React Native for your project
• How to set up your React Native project to work on a bigger scale
• How to use React Native to create a world-class product
• How to organize your team in a software project with React Native
• How to support your development team with useful tools and processes

This chapter contains a very brief introduction to the main concepts of React as the foundation on which React Native was built, of React Native itself, and of the Expo framework, which is a set of tools and libraries built on top of React Native. We will focus on the key concepts that are relevant for understanding the content that will be covered later in this book.

If you already have a very good understanding of how React, React Native, and Expo work, feel free to skip this chapter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Exploring React
• Understanding React basics
• Introducing React Native
• Introducing Expo