Why Is React Native Considered Ideal for Hybrid App Development?

4 min readMar 8, 2021

React Native has already been popular among the developers as one of the most advanced frameworks based upon JavaScript and ReactJS. The framework is particularly popular because of its capability to build highly native feeling mobile apps using the same code for multiple mobile platforms.

For years, hybrid app development that brings together the cross-platform development benefits with some native features has been criticized because of its lack of native user experience. Despite delivering apps with native platform compatibility, hybrid apps always lacked fully native apps in terms of user experience and app performance. This is where React Native appeared as a great alternative.

React Native, despite being primarily a hybrid app development framework, offers user experience comparable to the native apps. React Native in spite of allowing reuse of the same codebase for multiple platforms helps to integrate the local device functionalities and OS-specific attributes with the app user experience. Hence React Native has become the most successful framework for building hybrid apps.

If you are in doubt whether to choose Flutter or React Native, consider reading this article. You will also know the reason why React and AWS Amplify go hand in hand.

Must Read: Top 3 Reasons Why React Native Mobile Development is in Popularity

Who Chooses to React Native and When We should Choose?

In spite of the huge popularity of the React Native framework all over the globe, not all app projects perfectly fit the React Native framework. This is why it is important to know the apps using React Native and what type of app projects are suitable for this framework. Though many people think that React Native is the framework for small businesses and startups who cannot afford expensive native app projects for multiple platforms, the long list of big brands choosing React Native for their apps offers a different perspective. From Facebook, Instagram to Tesla, Walmart, and Uber, a multitude of big brand apps are built using React Native.

It is important to understand that there is nothing like building a native app for every platform to achieve great user experience and app performance. But at the same time, if you can achieve the same or near-perfect user experience and performance by using a cross-platform development framework, it helps you save a lot of cost and time while not compromising on the quality.

Now that we are almost convinced of the excellent benefits of using React Native let us explain the key advantages.

React Native Makes Cross-Platform Apps Appear Like Native Apps

React Native framework incorporates the most important native components from both the iOS and Android that native app developers use when using Swift or Java in their native app development projects.

Hybrid apps that are web apps with a native wrapper to be usable on native mobile platforms have many shortcomings in comparison to the native apps. Hybrid apps have limited capabilities in integrating native device features and user experience attributes. In complete contrast, React Native apps completely appear and behave like native mobile apps on both iOS and Android. Even the most well designed and dynamic hybrid app will stand nowhere when compared to the React Native apps.

The Reusable Codebase for Both iOS and Android

The biggest reason to choose to React Native is the reusability of the codebase for both app versions on iOS and Android. The philosophy that makes the core value proposition of React Native is “write code once and run on several platforms”. This helps developers to build an app that, apart from a few platforms, specific changes can run simultaneously on multiple platforms.

According to most expert React Native developers, around 80% of the app code is reused between platforms, and this reusability of the core codebase boosts productivity, ensures faster development speed, and lower cost of development for the app projects.

Less Demanding on Expertise and Talents

First of all, React Native as a framework comes with a pretty manageable learning curve. Secondly, just because the framework uses the ReactJS programming model and ReactJS as the most prominent JavaScript framework already has a considerable number of developers behind it, experts in web development can quickly fit into React Native projects. Without needing specialist React Native app developers, companies having developers with expertise in any of the three platforms, namely, web, iOS, or Android, can perfectly undertake React Native projects.

Live Updates

Getting quick and effortless updates is a great feature of React Native. The framework also allows users to avail of the latest features and user experience through live updates. The live update feature is a core element of JavaScript that allows developers to push the updates directly into the user’s device so that they don’t need to depend on the platform’s update cycle. This ensures updating the app quickly instead of continuing to use the older app version.

Reducing the Coding Effort and Time

React Native is a great framework to reduce the coding efforts and coding time for the app projects. Despite the need to build platform-specific UI elements, React Native thanks to its reusability of the code and low-footprint coding approach, reduces the entire programming efforts and time to a minimum. Besides boosting productivity, this also ensures maintaining the lightweight build of an app project.

Conclusion

For the mobile app development world, React Native not just brings a fully competent framework. Still, a complete technology equipped with every arsenal to take on the varying challenges of cross-platform and hybrid app projects. No wonder React Native is popularly used across app projects of all sizes and niches, ranging from small business and startup apps to big business brands.

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