If you want to be a good startup founder, you have to choose the best tools for your teams, so they perform at their best without compromising quality. Consider — for your mobile engineering — React Native as one of such tools. This article will explain the benefits of adopting the framework: by yourself or via using react native development services — and outline how RN can positively impact your team performance and your team performance overall.
Benefits of Using React Native for Your Startup
According to Stack Overflow, more than 69% of programmers around the globe are choosing React Native when it comes to mobile app development. Since its release back in 2015, it is continuing to be used by the giants like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Skype, Wix, Tesla, Call of Duty, Uber, and many others. If React Native can back up the needs of such huge companies, it has more than enough capacity to work for you as well.
Benefits for Business
React Native Helps Startups Reduce Costs & Save Time of Development
React Native saves companies lots of money due to the productivity and economic efficiency it brings to the table. Because it’s a cross-platform framework, it allows sharing the infrastructure, business logic, and about 90% of the codebase between iOS and Android apps. Even though the other 10% will have to be written in Java/Kotlin or Swift (which RN devs are usually prepared for — and know where to seek advice if they lack knowledge within native development), it still saves you costs of hiring two people and working on two projects simultaneously, aligning all peculiarities between platforms’ UIs, and so on.
React Native Tools Help Create a Great User Experience
The responsiveness of React Native makes it so simple and easy to use, that millions of developers are falling in love with its features. Large and mature development community created thousands of libraries with ready-to-use components for UI: maps, typography, forms, layouts, transitions, animations — everything your engineers would want to create apps quickly while still making them beautiful.
React Native allows developers access to native APIs from within the JavaScript environment, and that helps them cover all native UI-related peculiarities of the app, so the app isn’t just beautiful — it feels native.
React Native Developers are Easy to Find
React Native has been in the game for more than six years now — Facebook constantly improves it, fixing performance issues, bugs, and being very receptive to the dev community’s feedback. Developers love it because of it, too.
So, being a very popular technology makes React Native a solution for another issue every startup has to face – assembling a well-fitting team. Two out of three developers choose it before other frameworks, which means you can find RN developers remarkably quickly. Besides, JavaScript that RN uses is the most used language of the world and JS developers can easily switch to mobile development within the framework after quick due diligence: the learning curve is very short here.
Technical Benefits
React Native has Great Compatibility with Server-Side Frameworks
Django. Django is a Python framework for clean and back-end development. Django works well with React Native for the development of web applications and mobile apps, where Django handles server-side code and APIs while RN does the UI work due to the flexibility they both possess. The pair is also a good choice for apps that handle machine learning algorithms and data science — because of Python (like for healthcare or travel or an app that does any kind of forecasting — you got it.)
Ruby on Rails. Thinking of Ruby, the first thing that comes to mind is an enormous community that is out there working in front of their screens. Ruby-on-Rails is a server-side back-end framework for Ruby, and it is, too, a good tool for handling back-end processes when coupled with React Native’s capabilities. Together they provide them with unbelievable speed-of-development — faster than development with RN and Django, so if the pair is a good choice for MVP engineering (and if you’re in a real hurry.)
Fast Refresh
In the past, RN had two features for providing developers with instant feedback on their code (meaning they’ve shown developers the changes in their code within the app’s interface as they were writing it). Live reload refreshed the entire app to show changes. Hot reloading refreshed only the file — a part of the code — that has been changed (without, therefore, reloading the whole app.) The hot reloading feature was incredibly buggy and it was easy to make it compile code with typos and mistakes, which was bad for the speed of development. And then — see, the evidence RN dev team does keep track of the community’s feedback — Fast Refresh is released.
Fast Refresh is hot reloading and live reload, combined: it performs great, it doesn’t crash after typos, it doesn’t allow developers to mess with invasive code changes, in other words — it’s great. For developers, that means, of course, quicker & more comfortable & less distracted engineering. Fast Refresh is all about allowing developers to stay into the zone — you know, instead of waiting for the code to compile.
Opportunity To Use Third-Party Plugins and Frameworks
As it’s already been mentioned, RN’s development community has access to insane numbers of third-party libraries, plugins, and SDKs. For instance, NativeBase — a component library for mobile and web UI components that has more than 16k+ stars on GitHub and has almost everything you can think of in terms of UI: from accessibility boxes to themes to all elements needed to build design systems. Another one is Galio, an RN library that helps build apps from basics to layouts. These tools contribute a lot to the speed of development: developers could put UI elements from the libraries right into the code without inventing anything from the scratch.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you were able to get an insight into some of React Native’s perks and their significance in today’s business environment. React Native is incredibly versatile, too — you can start using RN as a cross-platform tool of choice at any stage of your product development if you want to speed up things, save time, or try to test or build something new without investing millions.
