Why We Love React Native and You Should, Too: The CEO’s Manifesto

They say, ‘Haters gonna hate.’ I beg to differ. Knowledge is the key to understanding, so even the framework’s arch-enemies can change their mind once they learn more about its positive impact on business growth.

At Ideamotive, we support startups, executives, and product owners with technology innovation to help them deliver ingenious mobile applications and evolve their businesses faster. React Native is one of the key tools that we use to make this happen.

That’s why today, I would like to share some insights about the framework, based on our extensive experience in delivering hybrid mobile app projects. This is just a snippet of what React Native has to offer. For comprehensive information, visit our ultimate guide to React Native.

How Did It Start?

The beginnings of React Native were quite humble. The framework started in 2013, as an internal side-project at Facebook, developed by a bunch of passionate engineers looking for an alternative to native mobile app development. Within the next two years, Facebook added support for Android devices and released React Native to the public. Since then, the framework has continued to win mobile developers’ hearts all over the world.

Today, React Native is one of the most popular GitHub repositories, with over 1,800 contributors and more than 15K commits.

[See GitHub]

The story of our company’s success goes hand in hand with React Native’s rise to glory. When we started in 2014, the framework was still in its infancy. Despite that, we immediately recognized its potential and decided to battle-test it in one of our first mobile projects. It was spot on!

Why React Native Development?

What made us lean towards a tool that was little known at that time? We build digital products for startups and businesses at the forefront of innovation, such as Nielsen, GoGetty, or JRPass. To serve our Clients with five-star custom software development skills and profound technical expertise, we are continuously learning and keeping up with the rapid pace of the changing technology environment.

This art of evolving complex business requirements into user-friendly, trailblazing solutions requires a careful choice of technologies. When evaluating React Native, we could instantly tell that by adding it to our technology stack, we’d open a new avenue for our Clients to deliver high-performance, scalable mobile apps.

What’s So Special About It?

React Native enables building cross-platform mobile apps with a native look and feel. Developers can write code once and then run it anywhere, which makes the framework vital for streamlining and accelerating the software development process.

But the speed of programming is just one of the countless benefits of React Native development. Let me share with you another 7 top advantages of React Native that stand out most. For more, check out our online guide.

3x Faster Project Delivery

As opposed to native apps, hybrid mobile app development allows you to maintain a single codebase for multiple platforms. That, combined with the hot reloading feature, leads to a significant decrease in project delivery time. In some projects, we’ve been able to reduce time-to-market for our customers’ products by threefold!

Small Team – Large Scale

Another great feature of React Native is that it only requires a single team of agile engineers to develop an app to all vendors. Smaller teams usually demonstrate deeper project engagement, and they make better use of collaboration tools. On top of that, it’s much easier to manage a group of several developers who exchange information each day, than a complex matrix of scattered teams and departments using different technologies.

So even if you’re a small startup planning a global launch of a brand-new app, React Native allows you to do so as it requires limited resources. What follows, are immediate savings on HR and training and shorter development time.

Reduced Costs of Development

As the development time decreases thanks to React Native, so do the costs involved. React Native allows you to accomplish the same results as native but faster, with a smaller team, and lower HR & admin overhead. Moreover, the framework is fully open-sourced and does not require platform-specific IDE, which means you can save on exorbitant license fees that are mandatory for using some native software.

Maximum Code Reuse

The words most feared in the IT industry? “It works on my machine.” Yeah, right. So another reason why React Native is pretty amazing is the fact that you’re unlikely ever to hear this line again. As it’s a multi-platform framework, React Native delivers consistent results, regardless of the target OS.

Developing code in platform-specific repositories calls for bigger teams and increases the probability of error and inconsistencies across product versions. With React Native, we’re able to share up to 80-90% of code between iOS and Android. That makes development much more efficient and reliable (plus, the code usually works the same on all machines;).

Robust Community

React Native is a sweet spot between empowering business growth and positive coding experience. That’s one of the reasons why it boasts a huge community of devoted supporters.

The tool is free, easily accessible, and steadily evolving. Thanks to all contributors who expand it on a daily basis, it also offers extensive documentation and support, which makes programming much easier. All of that produces a kind of snowball effect. React Native is great, so developers support it; developers support it, thus making it even greater!

Native Performance

One of the fundamental assets of React Native is that its components map 1:1 with native development artifacts. So, although you only need a single code repository, your software is running on multiple platforms and provides a genuine, natural look & feel of a native app.

What’s more, React Native seamlessly integrates with the existing mobile app code, whatever the language. Thanks to this feature, you can quickly add extensions to your product to make it even more amazing.

Goodbye, Recompilation!

Mobile apps continue to grow in complexity and can become pretty cumbersome in maintenance. One process that may get particularly frustrating to developers is the compilation. After all, waiting for code to recompile after each minor change can easily take half an hour of a developer’s busy day.

React Native tackles this issue as it allows all changes to be applied on the fly, with no app restart. This capability, called ‘hot reloading’ not only makes a developer’s life much easier but also helps boost productivity and avoid distraction. It’s definitely one of the best features out there for enhancing code development efficiency.

The Bright Outlook

Because the story of our company is intricately linked to that of React Native development, we know the framework like the back of our hand. As it was maturing, we were growing and expanding as well, and by now, we’ve leveraged it in dozens of customer projects for various industries, including med-tech, transport, booking, telecom or social media.

React Native has been an enabler for our success and the driving factor behind innumerable projects of our clients. And the best part is – the framework continues to evolve, so we are confident more and more companies will be turning to React Native experts like ourselves to help them put the framework to good use.

For those reasons and more, at Ideamotive, we’re devout React Native supporters, on a mission to provide businesses of all sizes with the best possible insight into the framework. Have you already taken advantage of React Native? Are you considering it for your project?

Whatever the case, I’d like to engage you in a discussion about React Native and encourage to learn more about it in our guide.