At Paloma we’ve been React Native users since it was created. We have been building and launching mobile applications since the launch of the iOS app store. In those days the only options were to build using the toolkits provided by Apple and Android. If you wanted to be on both iOS and Android you had to build it twice. Over time cross platform technologies emerged, the goal being to write the application once and deploy it to both platforms. In reality most didn’t work well.

But in 2015 Facebook released React Native, and it showed true promise in terms of creating great mobile user experiences across platforms with a single codebase. Paloma trialed it and adopted it, and since then we’ve used it to build countless mobile apps. Most notably the Afterpay app, which has been in market since 2017 and is used by millions of users daily. We’ve found React Native super effective as a way to rapidly build mobile applications that can scale to millions of users and be maintained over a long period of time.

Why we love React Native

Native UI

Reasonable people can disagree on it React Native is fully “native”. But its rendering layer does drive native UI components, which is what we consider most important.

There’s a few advantages to having native UI in an application:

• You can use components with behaviour that a user expects. Users become accustomed to how a button on iOS feels when you press it, they understand how page navigation works on iOS vs Android. Relying on native UI components respects these expectations even in a cross platform app.
• Your UI will likely be more responsive. Web applications can require round trips to the server introducing latency in interactions.
• You can rely on cross cutting OS level features for accessibility like screen reading, font resizing, localisation etc.

The downside of using native UI is that sometimes platforms will diverge and UI will have to look and behave differently on different platforms. Luckily React Native makes it easy to create diverged platform specific UI by just appending .ios or .android to the end of component filenames.

Why we love React Native

JavaScript as a language

Is JavaScript the best language in the world? No. Is it everywhere? Yes.

The ubiquity of JavaScript gives us a few advantages:

• It’s relatively easy to hire developers who may have only worked on web products and upskill them to mobile. The native languages like Swift or Kotlin have a relatively steep learning curve.
• A developer can work across iOS, Android and web too (assuming your stack there is JavaScript). This lets a single team carry a feature across all platforms, meaning more unity across all.
• React Native stands on the shoulders of React JS, a popular and battle tested web framework.

Why we love React Native

It’s rapid to develop in

JavaScript isn’t a compiled language, so when a developer is building the application they don’t need to sit waiting for the project to compile and run and test their change. They can make a change and see it reflected in their app instantly.

In some ways this seems like a minor thing. But aggregated over days and months: if you’re saving 10, 20, 30 seconds of compile time and it’s something you’re doing every few minutes. It’s a huge time saving. It really speeds up how quickly you can build and iterate on your app.

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