Future of React Native

React Native was first introduced (2015) by Facebook as an open-source framework for building native mobile apps using JavaScript and React. It aimed to provide a solution for developers to write code once and deploy it on both iOS and Android platforms.

How It becomes favorite for hybrid app development:

There are many great features of React Native like:

1. Native like performance
2. Code reusability
3. Access to Native features & Many more

However, the main advantage is large ecosystem & community support. It is introduced by Facebook, so we know that there would be great community support, and it is. Many others organizations or individuals also contributing to the same.

Problems Solved by React Native:

1. There were already hybrid tools in the market, but they were not that much scalable, robust and easy to use.
2. React-native use JavaScript and JavaScript already had a great consumer base, so it was very easy to learn and integrating.
3. As Mentioned in the first section, they have a large community of contributors, so developers do not have to completely stuck for a problem, people are very active for any issue raised by developers on stack overflow or GitHub.

Challenges of React Native:

1. As a developer, we have to very careful while including any library since that library may come with some security issue, memory leak and unsupported features.
2. It also becomes very difficult to choose hybrid development when security comes into the picture. Information might get lost while going from native to react or vice versa. However, It is improving day by day.
3. It has a great community support. But still, it heavily depends on Facebook for development & maintain.

It is continuing to evolving:

Facebook introduced a new React Native Architecture (As part of 0.68 version) that solved many problems.

Below is a brief summary of points of the same.

1. Bridge is replaced by JavaScript interface that resulted in great performance of the application.
2. Hermes: Hermes was before the new architecture, however it is well integrated with JSI. It reduces the launching time of an application.
3. Code Gen help with static type check and also generate native code.

These are only a few points with very brief details about new architecture, but it looks really promising. I will soon write a detail article about the same.

Please note that, There are many big companies are using React Native, and they are also contributing to the open source library.

Just checkout Flash list developed by Shopify that is a great example of reusability and performance optimization.

Hope It is useful information.