Mobile technology has come a long way in the past decade. Smartphones are becoming faster and more capable, allowing us to run more complex software with every iteration.
As a result, the usage of mobile apps has spread out to almost every industry imaginable. Studies predict that by 2023, mobile applications will bring more than $930 billion in revenue through app stores and advertising.
Furthermore, the mobile market is becoming increasingly eclectic, with both Android and iOS having a fair share of the market (73% vs 27%). Consequently, a framework that allows for greater interoperability and seamless integration is always welcomed by developers.
In this article, we talk about the React Native mobile framework and some of the pros of utilizing it for creating mobile apps. We have also chosen 5 of the most popular mobile apps created with the help of React Native.
These examples will demonstrate why selecting React Native among the available frameworks might be the optimal solution for your app.
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What is React Native?
React Native is a mobile app framework. It was launched by Facebook in 2015 to facilitate mobile app development. It helps developers use their JavaScript knowledge to deploy native apps on various operating systems.
The React Native framework makes it easy to create applications for various operating systems using the same code base. By using the framework, developers can simultaneously build native solutions on iOS, Android, and Windows, without sacrificing the quality of any of the apps. React Native allows them to share code between the platforms without compromising user experience.
Why was React Native created?
React Native isn’t a novel concept, as it was already used by the Facebook company to create the web version of their social media platform. The developers of the mobile apps were having trouble following simultaneous developments on iOS and Android. Having two separate apps resulted in irregular updates and asymmetrical user experience.
React Native was created to solve this problem and provide a common coding framework for all mobile Facebook apps. As a cross-platform framework, it was adopted by many popular mobile apps and showed outstanding results.
Why choose React Native for your mobile app solution?
The React Native framework brings a wide array of benefits for the developer:
- Faster development — the framework proposes a wide range of components that can be easily applied to speed up the development process.
- Lower cost multi-platform development — Because code can be easily reused from one platform to another, it requires less time for the apps to be adapted from iOS to Android and vice-versa.
- Requires smaller dev teams — Thanks to the intuitive UI and usability of the framework, the development team size is reduced, making React Native a cost-effective solution.
Top React Native apps in circulation today
In addition to Facebook’s mobile applications, many have chosen the React Native path for easier multi-platform integration. Below are some of the most popular React Native apps operating today.
1. Instagram
The popular photo-sharing app and social network started exploring the use of React Native in 2016. The goal was to provide updates and ship additional features more rapidly, while at the same time being able to share code between the iOS and Android versions.
To tackle the React Native integration into Instagram, developers started with a simple view, which was Push Notifications. This simple UI was the starting point that brought React Native into Instagram, which was later followed by the Edit Profile view.
With time, the performance of Instagram using React Native improved. Ultimately, the development time decreased, allowing teams to ship features in iOS and Android simultaneously.
2. Shopify
With the number of mobile customers increasing, the e-commerce platform decided to integrate React Native into its apps in 2019.
The company believed that the technology would allow them to provide better and faster e-commerce solutions to their customers. Consequently, the developer team rewrote three crucial features of their mobile Shopify app: Arrive, Point of Sale, and Compass.
With that said, Shopify is not rewriting the entirety of its native app in React Native. Instead, they continue using the framework for creating essential components for their app.
3. Uber Eats
Uber Eats adopted React Native in early 2017. The food-ordering and delivering platform turned to the mobile app framework to help their team improve their Restaurant dashboard in Android and iOS apps.
Because their original app was web-based, their dev team was accustomed to working with React. Hence, adopting React Native was the logical step forward for the company. The jump allowed them to push fast updates for their Restaurant Dashboard, one of their flagship features of the Uber Eats platform.
This has helped the food delivery platform to scale exponentially with its growth due to the coronavirus crisis.
4. Discord
Initially considered as a gamer’s communication platform for web users, the Discord chat service quickly spread over to mobile. Thanks to the enormous growth of mobile games, the team needed a multiplatform solution that would cover all mobile operating systems.
For this reason, they turned to React Native and built their iOS Discord app from scratch using the open-source framework. This resulted in a 99.9% crash-free app that is the same on every mobile device.
5. Coinbase
Coinbase is the largest US-based cryptocurrency exchange, which was recently listed publicly on the NASDAQ. With more and more users trading crypto on their smartphones, Coinbase needed some multi-platform consistency for their app.
Since January 2021, all Coinbase app versions (iOS and Android) have migrated from native to React Native, serving 56 million users. While the team encountered several challenges along the way, the transfer is now complete.
Wrapping up
React Native is an open-source solution that can help developers provide seamless cross-platform updates on several mobile operating systems simultaneously. The examples in our article show how some big companies took a leap of faith in adopting React Native. It was a judicious choice, as the framework has allowed them to scale their apps and provide a better user experience overall.
