React Native: Making Cross Platform Mobile Development Easy

React Native development comes with extraordinary features than any other mobile app development platform. Today, the demand for cross-platform apps has surged like never before and companies are choosing React Native to develop cross-platform apps.

What is a Cross Platform App?

Before moving forward, let’s first understand cross-platform apps. These apps are developed to work across platforms, OS, and environments. You can access the same app on the desktop, laptop, tab, or mobile and various OS such as iOS, Android, etc.

According to a study by famous research companies such as Forrester and Gartner. The figure below shows the surge:

Why Cross-platform development?

Large Audience coverage– Cross-platform development helps in the development and deployment of an application on various platforms. This approach helps in targeting both iOS and Android platforms, maximizing your reach.

Same as Native apps– Cross-platform technology delivers native like apps with the help of tools and technologies available easily.

Cost-effective development– Write Once and run everywhere. Using frameworks like React Native helps you reuse the reusable codes, and application development is agile, then there is no uneasiness that development costs will be low.

Easy Deployment and maintenance –In cross-platform development, one app is created to run on all platforms. Therefore, it is easier to maintain and deploy the code. It also helps in syncing all the updates on all platforms and devices, saving time and money.

Faster development process –Single source code for multiple platforms reduces the development efforts by half. It encourages faster development for any business app.

React Native for cross-platform development

React Native is preferred because:

• Develops stable and faster apps
• Has a better coding system
• Encourages optimal performance
• It has useful pre-loaded elements for easy coding
• It offers flexible application development

Special features of React Native Framework

Hot reload:

As the name suggests, Hot Reload allows the app to reload or refresh itself automatically during the development phase. This features updates the changes if any on its own without doing it manually. Hot reload saves time by fetching real-time data and live tracking all the changes, and applying it to the app. It even helps in updating the UI content and structural content while the code and script are updated.

Third-party plugins

Where many other frameworks do not allow third-party plugins, React Native allows simple integration with third-party plugins. The initial launch of React Native by Facebook was only for its purpose. Still, it later turned open-source, especially API and plugins support for easy customization and faster development.

Reusable components

React Native encourages faster development as you can easily reuse the already existing components or codes. The code for the Android app can be use for iOS applications in React Native hence making the development easier and faster. React Native is, therefore, the choice of big established organizations such as Walmart. Walmart switched to React Native by using 96% of code between iOS and Android app.

Targeting more audience

The study by Statista shows that React Native is the most preferred mobile app platform. Why would it not be? You can cover maximum audience at a time. Using this framework, you can make a cross-platform app to access a larger audience. Businesses can target audiences on all platforms using one application built in React Native.

Conclusion

One can confidently say that React Native Framework is perfect for cross-platform application development. The benefits are numerous that React Native developers may not find in other frameworks. The community of React Native development companies and individual developers has grown rapidly, hence making it even popular and easy to use.

Author Bio – I am a Senior Digital Marketer at Programmers.io situated in Coppell, Texas. I have 13 yrs of experience in digital marketing, with 7 years in Programmers.io

My expertise includes Business Strategy Building, SEO, Digital Marketing, and Lead Generation.