React Native Is a Framework developed by the teams of facebook in 2015 in order to accelerate the development and maintenance of its mobile applications. This technology makes it possible to develop native iOS and Android mobile applications with a unique code base while maintaining the “look and feel” of native applications.

In this article, we suggest that you focus on The story of React Native and to better understand how it works and the reasons for its success!

A framework designed by Facebook... Who is on the rise

2013: Launch of the React web library

When Facebook unveiled its React.js library during the JS Conf in 2013, we could not have guessed the impact of this web project on the future of the development of mobile applications. The ambition of this library was then to combine simplicity and modularity to make life easier for web application developers, in particular by encouraging the development of reusable components.

2015: Launch of the React Native framework

2 years later, driven by the immense popularity of this library, the Facebook teams unveiled another open source project in its continuity: React Native. This time the ambition is to revolutionizing the world of mobile development with a framework that allows web developers to develop natively rendered iOS and Android apps with a single JavaScript code base.

Unveiling React Native at the January 2015 React.JS Conf

2019: React Native, one of the most popular projects on Github

React Native is a huge success. 4 years after its launch, it is one of most popular open source projects on Github, with more than 2000 contributors all over the world and dozens of leading tech companies that have used it: Uber, Airbnb, Walmart, etc.. Successful applications using this framework today are more and more numerous.

The evolution of the interest of the React Native query on Google since 2016 shows the popularity of the framework.

React Native is based on the React.js framework

A framework is a predesigned code base with choices of architecture, functions, libraries, APIs. The aim is to simplify development by limiting the number of manual tasks that a developer will have to do.

React Native Is a Framework Who uses the JavaScript programming language and the React libraries developed by Facebook to develop web interfaces. Except that it is now mobile. In other words, the JavaScript web developers can develop mobile applications that have the performance and fluidity of native applications.

Until then, mobile developers had to program two distinct applications with very different languages (Swift or Objective-c for iOS, Java or Kotlin for Android), Facebook's ambition was to offer developers to develop only one code base for all platforms. This is made possible by a JavaScript engine that gives instructions to native instances.

The benefits of React Native

The benefits of React Native are very numerous, and explain its popularity, which has continued to grow since its creation. Of these, 3 caught our attention.

A JavaScript code base compatible with iOS and Android

First of all, this framework allows you to use a unique code base for all your platforms. This greatly speeds up and simplifies the development and maintenance of your applications. You will only have to develop your functionalities once, and this ensures consistency between your two Android and iOS applications at the same time.

One team for all your platforms

Use React Native will also allow you to considerably facilitate the management of your teams. A single code base for all your platforms means a single team working on the same technology.

Also, managing your recruitment and increasing the skills of your team will be all the more simplified since JavaScript is a very popular programming language: +70% of developers know it according to stackoverflow.

Native performances

The performance of an application is measured using various indicators:

• First byte time : the time it takes for your application to get an initial response from the servers. A good result can be found in 0.1 and 0.5 seconds.
• Charging time : the time between the launch of the application and the moment when the user can start using it. A load time of more than 1.5 seconds is considered to be disadvantageous.
• number of simultaneous requests : the number of requests that your application can handle at a time without degrading performance.
• Crash rate : the ratio between the number of crashes and the number of times the application was launched. Aim for a rate below 2%.
• Resource consumption : it is the consumption of memory, battery, processor.

With a React native app, you will give your users a browsing experience as smooth and efficient as on a native application, in particular thanks to the fact that React Native uses native APIs directly.

Ease of evolving your application

In addition, thanks to React Native, you will be able to evolve and debug your applications much more easily. On the one hand, because you only have to develop your changes once. And on the other hand because you can deploy your code simultaneously on all platforms. From a user perspective, downloading your updates will not be mandatory in all cases. Code push allows changes, such as bug fixes, to be passed without users noticing.

Finally, all the advantages mentioned above contribute to the reduction of your development costs, without altering the performance and fluidity of your applications, whose native rendering will not allow users to differentiate it from its traditional native applications.

“Before React Native, what? Would Bloomberg teams have? envelope? the iOS and Android versions in parallel? The, without being able to share most of the code they e? were writing, leading to? delays and redundancy.” Gabriel Lew, Senior Software Engineer, Bloomberg

Performance, speed, cost, simplicity, the advantages of the React Native framework are numerous! At BAM, we have developed our expertise since the beginning of the framework in 2015, and we are now The largest team of React native experts from France.

If you want to know more, feel free to download our white paper on React Native.