Introduction
Today, mobile apps are essential for your business! They offer the most efficient, direct & customizable way to deliver information about a product and encourage clients to remain loyal to a particular brand. But, you should be aware of the fact that making a mobile app isn't as easy as it sounds... In the mobile app industry, Apps come & go. And they come & go fast!
According to Statista, people all around the world downloaded 119 billion apps on Google Play and 36 billion on the App Store in 2021. 🤯
Sounds crazy right? And it doesn't end there...
By 2023, consumers are expected to download 149 billion mobile apps from the Google Play Store and 39 billion in the app store. (WUT!? 😱) And wait, there's more! Mobile apps could generate over $935 billion in revenue.
Those are mind-blowing numbers & a huge (❗) opportunity for your business.
Want more stats? Check out 👉 Mobile app stats from 2021 & beyond you need to know
How to capitalize on this exponential growing mobile app market?
So, what are your plans? Because today, users are becoming much more demanding than they used to be! Developers struggle to keep making apps that please them. This raises the question: what can you show your customers that’s impressive, works great, and seamlessly integrates with their mobile operating system?
Previously, there were two types of apps on the market: Native & Hybrid. Both had unique qualities:
- Native apps are developed separately for different platforms (Android and iOS). They are of better quality, have better UI/UX, and are more secure. But they take a long time & cost a fortune to be built.
- Hybrid Apps are developed only once and are used on multiple platforms. They are cheaper & quicker to build but suffer from poor performance & quality.
However, when it comes to developing an app, you don't want to choose between quality & cost. As a self-respecting business, you should be able to provide both. This meant that it was up to developers to figure out better ways to get around it and make better marketable products.
One of those betters ways, that we use at Nightborn, is called React Native!
Why? Well... In this blog, we'll tell you what React Native is and why you should consider it for your mobile project. 💡
The story behind React Native
The story of React Native is quite fascinating: what started as Facebook’s internal hackathon project, in the summer of 2013, has since become one of the most popular frameworks. In fact, Facebook (now Meta) first created React to build its own social platform. (You know... That social network where all the boomers go to show their pets 😉😻).
After further development, Facebook released ReactJS for the web as an open-source, but they were still struggling with its mobile app. They needed to maintain two codebases: one for iOS, and one for Android. Features implemented in Swift on iOS had to be implemented separately in Java on Android, leading to work duplication and asymmetrical apps.
That's why they created React Native, a JavaScript framework to create apps for multiple platforms using the same codebase. At first, Facebook built it for its own social portal. But in March of 2015, they announced that React Native was open-source & available on GitHub.
💡 Check out 👉 Nightborn on Github 🤓
Since then, its growth & adoption rate doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. More & more companies have decided to bet on it and create their mobile apps this way. Big brands such as Instagram, Airbnb, Bloomberg & Tesla are using React Native!
Putting your app on such a list isn’t the worst idea in the world. Right? 🤷♂️
So, what is React Native?
As previously said, React Native is an open-source JavaScript framework that allows developers to create apps for multiple platforms using the same codebase. No more separately writing iOS and Android versions in Java or Swift/Obj-C without the ability to share the code!
React Native lets you construct mobile apps using the same design as React, a JavaScript library. Bringing glory to mobile app development with beautiful UI & development time cut in half. Why? Because Devs finally could unify their development capabilities and focus on one feature at a time.
Even software giant Microsoft took notice of React Native, prompting them to create their own fork: React Native for Windows. Their solution allows developers to more easily create apps for Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, and Xbox One.
💡 Do you want to learn more about the framework, approach, architecture, and performance? Check out the blog post on the differences between Flutter and React Native.
👉 Flutter vs React Native: What are the differences?
Why Nightborn uses React Native
App development agencies used to face two major problems: technology limitations & customer demand.
With platform technology, based on HTML5, Javascript, or other solutions, we knew cross-platform could never achieve the level of performance of native apps.
💡 How Cross-Platform Development Improves Client Experience and Satisfaction
Besides that, our customers nowadays want greater customization freedom & more powerful apps (and with good reason 😉). It was an obvious choice when you add the rising competition & automated app maintenance, which both will drive mobile app development prices down.
For multiple reasons:
- It solves architectural problems while allowing us to achieve a level of performance that is equal to native apps.
- It's a cross-platform solution that doesn't compromise on quality.
- It provides beautiful UI/UX & safety features which are commonly missing from Hybrid apps.
- It allows us to open our platform to other developers in order to supercharge development
- It gives us the opportunity to extend platform functionalities with new extensions.
- It's super developer-friendly and doesn’t require learning native iOS and Android languages, or native APIs.
- It's growing fast & under active development through Facebook and its massive community.
- It allows us to build apps faster, reload apps instantly & run new features while maintaining the application state.
Is React Native perfect for your project?
You’ve now discovered some of the benefits of React Native & why we at Nightborn use it. But you’re still not sure if you should use it in your project?
We'll convince you one more time! 😎 Here's what it can do for your business:
- Save time and money: React Native apps are easy to write and can cut your codebase by up to 95%, saving you both time and money. On top of that, React Native has a number of open-source libraries of pre-built components which can help you further speed up the development process. 💸
- Provides a great user experience: It gives your customers a smooth & responsive user interface (UI) and reduces load time while maintaining quality & functionality.
- Allows using existing skills: Since React Native is built on JavaScript, developers working on your project (internal or external) will have no trouble getting started. Having said this, it’s an open-source & community-driven framework, so if they ever need support, it’s widely available online.
- Third-party plug-ins and APIs: React Native also allows you to easily add third-party plug-ins and APIs, including maps & payment systems.
Final words
Here you go, those were our thoughts on the many benefits React Native can deliver.
At Nightborn, we feel we can give you the best conditions for your project because we don't need two development teams for two platforms, we develop faster & can get more out of your budget. Feel free to drop us a line! we’d be thrilled to help out!
🙌🏻 If you liked this article, you might also like:
- What does a back-end developer do?
- How we used React, Gatsby, and Prismic to create a high-end and well-polished website
.webp)