How your React Native skills can help you
Mobile app developers have for many years had to compromise between user experience or apps that are fast to develop and can run on multiple platforms and devices. The answer to this is to compromise with a hybrid mobile app that’s wrapped in a container enabling it to run natively on a device with unusually fast load times and a smooth agile feel and this is where Facebook’s React Native comes in. It doesn’t really seem to be a compromise but more of a win win scenario. It is still fairly new (it’s been around about 3 years) but its maturing quickly especially with Facebook’s support.
React Native is leading the way for hybrid mobile apps with its UI design framework and is more like a JavaScript library compared with other JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS. You are building a real mobile app indistinguishable from one built with Objective-C or Java but using the same UI building blocks as Android and iOS apps. The only real difference is that you put those building blocks together using JavaScript and React. The library can now be used for both Android and iOS and React Native is Open Source which will hopefully enable it to work on other platforms such as Windows or tvOS in the future. React Native’s components can also be used within any existing app’s code and is also compatible with third party plugins.
It is easy to use if you already know JavaScript which means any front end developer can instantly become a mobile developer with experience of a few native UI elements, platform APIs and design patterns.
The future of mobile app development appears to start here – it’s time to climb onboard. The market for React Native developers is still fairly small but it is growing very fast with an 800% rise in contract and 300% in Permanent roles this year (admittedly from a small start). React.js is now the 4th most popular framework and most loved by those who want to learn something new – it looks like React Native will be just as popular.