React Native Development, How Appropriate is it in 2022 in the Development Space?

Is React Native development still beneficial in 2022? Heck yes, and it is nowhere near becoming redundant in the cross-platform app development space. In this article, we shall briefly discuss the applicability and usefulness of this technology.

The world of web and mobile development is very dynamic. Periodically many technological and programming solutions are born, some of them are widely adopted by the development community and some are not so popular. However, it’s not easy to prophesize the end of any programming language or technology. Let’s take a prominent example, Java. It has been declared that Java will be doomed, half a dozen times before, but it’s still clicking. FORTRAN which was created in 1954, is still being used in places. However, our point here is not to look at prior technologies or languages but to examine if React Native is still useful in 2022.

Current development space

Owing to the fast growth of smartphone users in the last decade, it has become evident that, if businesses need more traffic to their websites or applications, they need to build mobile-friendly applications. However, the smartphones used by the customers are not uniform. Two major market shareholders in the smartphone OS space are Android and iOS. Hence if a solution or app needs to be developed that must cater to both the arenas. This is where the role of cross-platform app development comes to play. A single app that is developed to cater to the need of all the users. Simultaneously cross-platform app development considers and takes advantage of efficient UI development, business logic, and faster deployment.

Since building native applications which targets a specific OS, building two applications not only needs two different teams to specialize in building apps for those OS; but also increases the costs significantly for development, implementation, and maintenance. There is where react-native comes in handy which builds beautiful cross-platform apps and does this promptly.

Let’s look at the strength and weaknesses of React Native framework

Every technology has its advantage and disadvantages and React Native framework is no exception. Developed and released by Facebook in 2015, React-Native is an open-source JavaScript Framework.

Following are the strengths of React-Native which works using the same principles as React

• Component-based structure
• Hot reloading
• Large ecosystem of developer tools (It is backed by the entire JavaScript community, makes it easy for sharing knowledge, and makes it easier for everyone to find fixes for issues)
• The above aspects reduce the cost of development drastically
• Monorepo approach makes it easier to do efficient coding that is, codes common to web applications and mobile applications and shared between projects (the benefit being the reduction of networking calls, state management, and logic)

Weaknesses or disadvantages of React-native framework

• Difficult to debug
• Hard to determine an interface
• Immature framework (framework updates are very fast and pose difficulties for developers)
• Difficult to build the cross-platform team

Competition from other technologies

When we are considering various aspects of using technology, it naturally comes to our mind about the alternatives available and comparative analysis to choose the best possible solution. However, asking which one is best doesn’t have a definitive answer. This is because every business is different, their functioning is different. Customers have their personalities and behavior as well. Hence everything is subjective here.

Currently, flutter is probably a very popular cross-platform app present in the market which puts forth a solid competitive atmosphere for React-native. However, it’s not completely flawless.

Other than Flutter, another popular framework is Xamarin, which is developed by Microsoft and features flexibility and scalability. However, it’s not suitable for UI-heavy applications like React native.

When it comes to choosing a solution, multiple factors come in such as the budget allocated for the project, timeframe available to deploy a project, complexity of the app, support available from the community, etc.

It may also be worth mentioning Native Script. It’s a technology from the JavaScript family, however, the issues with the plugin and a relatively smaller community associated with it, do not make it a contender for React-native.

The question that may arise is whether Flutter going to take over the market and react Native will not be used anymore. The answer is no. One technology simply doesn’t act like a predator. Several factors decide the existence and applicability of technology such as cost, complexity, features to use, resources, and supporting community. Moreover, a technology that is written using JavaScript is hard to disappear from the development scenario.

Conclusion

As we have said earlier, technologies have their advantages and disadvantages and the business decision to use React native framework to develop apps depends on the utility of the result. If the target audience of the web and mobile applications are the same react-native app development can be very useful for the business. However when it comes to building comprehensive solutions for both OS platforms that may pose some difficulty.

Nevertheless coming back to the original point we were discussing, is react-native going to be useful in 2022? Of course, yes. The advantages certainly outweigh the difficulties posed.