Is React Native the right choice for your business?

The world is going mobile! So much that the mobile app development market is expected to generate $693 billion in revenue by the end of 2021. Now’s the time to jump on the bandwagon and establish your business’s digital presence. 

You already know that iOS and Android are second to none in this race of mobile superiority. The real question is: how do you target them?  Clearly, the best way to maximise your reach would be to build an application that works on multiple platforms. But developing separate apps for Android and iOS takes time and money, which brings us to consider React Native for mobile app development.

React Native framework comes with some serious advantages your company can benefit from.  In this article, I’ll try to explain what makes React Native the best choice for your business.

But first, let’s take a look at native apps. 

What are native applications?

Long story short, a native app is one that will work only on iOS or on Android – one or the other. The thing is, such applications are written and optimised exclusively for a given platform since the OS manufacturers (i.e. Google or Apple) provide tools to create them.

As a result, you get a more polished UI, better performance and a closer integration with the smartphones’ hardware.

These luxuries don’t come cheap, however. Native app developers are among the most expensive professionals on the market. What is more, you need to hire two separate development teams: one for Android (Java or Kotlin) and one for iOS (Swift or ObjectiveC), increasing the cost even further.

What are your options when you don’t want to pay the premium price? You can turn your attention to cross-platform app development frameworks.

Understanding cross-platform 

Essentially, cross-platform development makes your application compatible with more than one platform or operating system at once. So your program works equally well on both Apple and Android mobile devices with the same code.  

It’s the best option when a short time-to-market and low development costs are your priority. Cross-platform significantly reduces the required amount of man-hours to finish your project.

But just like with native applications and their unique programming languages, cross-platform mobile development comes with a number of frameworks designed to make the developers’ lives easier and cut the production time even further. React Native is simply one of them.

6 benefits of React Native for your business

It’s an open-source framework created by Facebook engineers and made public in 2015. 

You might be wondering: “Why should I even care about it?” Well, these companies do:

Some of the industry-leading tech giants have already implemented React Native into their app repertoire. So the real question becomes – why shouldn’t you care about it? 

You might already be a heavy user of React Native apps, without even knowing it. Instagram addicted? The whole settings module is written with React Native. Heavy Discord user? All of their apps (web, mobile, desktop) use React Native and React JS. The same is true about some components of the Facebook mobile app.

But why is React Native becoming more and more popular by the day? Let’s jump to the first reason. 

ReactNative enables developers to create both iOS and Android apps at the same time, by taking JavaScript/ Typescript code and translating it into native app components. 

And it turns out that JS is the most popular programming language. 

Finding the right developers is not an easy task nowadays. Some argue that there is a shortage of good software engineers on the market. You, however, won’t have to worry. 

Choosing RN gives you easier access to skilled professionals. JavaScript is the main technology for web apps and the gap between web React library and mobile React Native library is not huge. The developers might adjust to new technology quite smoothly and even later jump between the repositories, making React Native accessible to even less experienced coders.

Less time spent looking for developers means more time to focus on what’s important. 

But wait, there’s more to React Native.

Compared to native mobile application development frameworks, building React Native mobile apps is much, much faster. There is no need to use two separate development teams, as the whole point of cross-platform is creating a mobile solution for iOS and Android simultaneously.

React Native offers a lot of code reusability, which can further bring the development time down. There are numerous pre-made assets, so there’s a good chance the functionality you want to implement has been worked out by someone else already. 

What’s the consequence of reducing the development time and the number of required mobile app developers?

It makes RN the best bet for companies with limited resources, such as new-founded startups. In fact, all of the other benefits of React Native listed above make it a perfect choice for further business scalability, with Airbnb being a great example of where it can lead a business.

But the perks don’t end here. With React Native…

What makes React Native app development so powerful is that there are still those native iOS and Android components under the hood. This ensures native-like performance, integration, and user experience.

And if you want to add some extra features to your app, you can easily implement pieces of native code into RN to customise the product to your needs.

Yet, creating the app is only the beginning. What comes after the release is just as important! 

A major advantage of RN over other cross-platform frameworks is that it actually operates on native iOS and Android elements. What does this mean for you?

If a new version of iOS or Android comes out and the way how push notifications work changes, your app created in React Native will reflect it immediately. There is no need to rewrite the code and release an updated version of the app to AppStore or Google Play, like with other cross-platform frameworks (f.e. Flutter).

If you think RN is already awesome, wait and see what it will be able to offer in a couple of years!

RN is open-source, so it can take advantage of the collective skill and knowledge of developers across the world. It’s still supported by Facebook engineers and has recently gained attention from Microsoft developers.

The community is quite large, as ReactNative has the 26th (out of the total 260 million) most popular repository on GitHub. New major updates come out once every few months, bringing extra functionalities to the table and improving the existing ones.

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s easy to integrate RN with third-party apps, such as Stripe, which might be a true game-changer for you.

These were the major benefits of choosing React Native as a cross-platform app development solution, let’s get to the summary. 

Summary

Speed matters in business. A faster MVP can be an edge over your competition. ReactNative reduces the time-to-market, cuts down your costs and provides great user experience. As a bonus, you need fewer developers, who also happen to be easier to come by.

What’s more, RN operates on native components which makes app maintenance a no-brainer.

If you’re looking for a cross-platform framework, RN seems to be your best bet. Many companies have already trusted ReactNative, appreciating all it has to offer.

Why not join them?