Why Choose React Native Platform for your App Development Project in 2023?

Like many developers, I faced the dilemma between customization and ease of using off-hand functional components for app projects. This is where React Native gave me a lot of freedom. The exceptional popularity apart from React Native among all app development frameworks offered us a balancing mechanism between the scope of customization and ready-to-use components.

After many years developing apps with React Native, I’m convinced of its trendsetting role. While giants like Facebook, Instagram, and Skype have used React Native, thousands of startup app projects also found the framework extremely useful. By searching some stats on React Native, I found that in 2022 React Native cross-platform development frameworks were used by 12.57% of developers globally.

From my own experience of using React Native, it offers advantages like fast, responsive UI building. From the perspective of app publishers and product owners, it ensures a faster release cycle and cost-effective development. Native development looks less relevant when React Native offers the same quality, performance, and native usability.

Key React Native Features

As we all know, React Native as a JavaScript framework does not just allow reusing code on both iOS and Android. Still, it also brings native UI functionalities without sacrificing the user experience. For your understanding, let me bring here the technical features of the framework.

• Cross-Platform Code Reusability: As a React Native developer, I cannot just develop apps for both iOS and Android platforms using the same codebase, but I can even transform a website into a native-looking mobile app with the same code base.
• Flexible Architecture: in this respect, I must mention the flexibility of React Native brought by its component-based architecture. The reusable code base here comes with components that work like building blocks for the project.
• Hot Reloading: This is a crucial capability introduced by other frameworks React Native made popular. This allows me to make code changes and see their impact in real time without refreshing the app. That saves a hell lot of time.
• JavaScript Interoperability: Another important offering of React Native is the way it allows me to switch between native UI modules between platforms and JavaScript without any friction.
• Virtual DOM: For developers like us working on most enterprise projects, rolling out updates always remains a concern, and there, the virtual DOM of React Native powered by the Document Object Model offers great relief.
• Live and Remote Debugging: I feel integrated testing tools lack coverage, but still, the remote debugging for troubleshooting and performance optimization help offered by React Native can help in speeding up the QA process.
• Third-Party Libraries: This is one area where React Native does things pretty impressively. The framework provides us with a robust repository of third-party plugins and libraries that, along with components, makes our job much easier.
• Platform-Specific Code: All these reusable code, components, and plugins apart, in several demanding projects, I found React Native extremely helpful in fulfilling native UX criteria as it allowed me to write platform-specific code with no difficulties.
• Asynchronous Rendering: As for releasing updates, disturbing the app’s performance remains a concern. This is another area where React Native offers great help through asynchronous rendering.
• Dynamic Styling: React Native is essentially a UI framework, and we have no shortage of dynamic stylization options here.
• Animation: In many of my projects, especially for the entertainment industry, I found other frameworks lack the robustness of React Native as far as powerful animation and transition features are considered.
• Accessibility: React Native adheres to modern accessibility guidelines and offers features like voiceover and screen readers.
• Internationalization: My experience with React Native helped me take projects beyond the anglophone world because of its internationalization capabilities, including multilingual and multicultural support.
• Performance: Last but not least, I must mention the excellent React Native performance and scalability, ensuring streamlined app performance irrespective of the complexity and features.

How does React Native Works?

Let me bring the practical aspects here. To start with the basics, React Native app development framework uses JavaScript to support rendering on both iOS and Android. React Native, as an offshoot of React JavaScript library, offers everything React offers, along with its mobile-specific components and native mobile rendering capabilities.

React Native ensures native rendering to run the app on any device OS, and while doing so, it uses the same native components that so-called native platform-specific apps use. But since we can tweak and create these components in JavaScript and render them elsewhere, we enjoy greater freedom. In my view, this is the biggest value proposition of React Native framework.

The other major area where React Native brings us a new approach to app development is virtual DOM. As a mobile app development framework, React Native helps me to release updates without interfering with the app performance and user experience because of this virtual DOM (Document Object Model). In performance-savvy apps, this easily reduces the update size making no impact on app performance.

What Makes React Native Stand Out from Other Frameworks?

We could start building natively rendered apps for both iOS and Android because React Native brought this approach. As a developer, I could sense the paradigm-shifting change it brought in developing apps back in 2014; the rest is history.
So, when I hear people digging into the React Native vs Flutter comparison, I still think the former has an edge that Flutter, despite its versatility, cannot match.

For aspiring developers, let me explain some React Native features and capabilities that withstand the competition.

• Making Hybrid Development Obsolete: I saw companies switching from a “one size fits all” hybrid approach to more natively inclined cross-platform development because it all started with React Native. No wonder they prefer to hire React Native developers for their projects targeting multiple platforms.
• Performance: I always saw React Native apps can perform better and load faster than their native counterparts. It uses the same core building blocks as regular iOS and Android platforms, and on top of that, the virtual DOM ensures keeping updates smaller for UI.
• Hot Reloading: React Native almost pioneered the hot reloading feature into mobile app development, allowing developers to make and see the changes in real-time. That saved our time to a great extent.
• JavaScript: I have come from a web background as a developer, and because React Native uses JavaScript, it became easier for me to set in and develop my skills further. Making a transition from React to React Native was seamless, and before knowing it, I started building cross-platform mobile apps.
• Reusable Components: React Native allowed us to create iOS and Android versions with reusable components and use the same components in other projects. It allowed us to save time in creating the same building blocks again and again.
• Huge Community Support: For seasoned developers, seeking community help is like breathing, so any framework with an active community always roars in popularity. React Native, with its large and active community support, never fails to improve skills, offer ready-to-use components, guide on issues, and many more. This also ensures that React Native is fast evolving and improving, and there will always be thousands of helping hands.  
• Cost-Competitive: Building an app using React Native is more cost-effective than using native app development because it allows developers to use a single codebase for both iOS and Android platforms, which reduces the development time and cost.
• Improved User Experience: React Native allowed me to build mobile apps with stunning user interfaces and deliver a user experience that competitively stands out. On top of that, the framework’s hot reloading feature enables developers to make and evaluate changes in real-time. So, updates for enhancing user experience can be rolled out faster.
• Flexible Architecture: If anything, that can ultimately convince us about React Native abilities more than any other framework, it is its component-based architecture. For my projects, it allowed building several different parts of the app with the same code, and of course, this also helped update the app faster.
• Fast Development: Com8ng to modern app project requirements, we cannot undermine the importance of a shorter time to market, and this is where React Native excels. All significant attributes commonly associated with development speed can be found in React Native. We have everything from reusable components to hot-reloading to extensive third-party plugins to speed up the app development process.
• High Performance: As per my experience, businesses prefer low-footprint and legible apps with high performance and easy maintainability. React Native perfectly fits these requirements because of its use of virtual DOM and ease of using native UI components.

Summing It Up

As a React Native developer with half a decade of experience, I still suggest my clients go for React Native instead of Flutter and Xamarin. While my skills and expertise have a bearing on such suggestions, the framework is no less convincing with its robust component repository, ease of use and versatility across diverse projects, advanced feature set, and robust community support.

After learning the tremendous advantage of react native platform. Now, you start looking for a trusted mobile app development company in India to create an app using React Native technology. Then feel free to contact our expert React Native development team today!