Chapter 14: Why React Native?
Facebook created React Native (RN) to build its mobile applications. It started as a hackathon project in the summer of 2013 inside Facebook and became open source for everyone in 2015. The motivation to release it was because React for the web was so successful. They thought that if React was such a good tool for user interface (UI) development, and you wanted a native application, why not just make React work with mobile OS UI elements!
Therefore, in the same year, Facebook divided React into two independent libraries, React and ReactDOM, and since then, React has had to work only with interfaces and not care about where these elements will be rendered. The rendering part for the web was taken by ReactDOM, and for mobile platforms by RN.
In this chapter, you'll learn about the motivations for using RN to build native mobile web applications. Here are the topics that we'll cover in this chapter:
- What is RN?
- React and JSX...