Pros and Cons of React Native Development

Сross-platform development points to the process of creating an app that works on several platforms. This is done by using tools like React Native, where the apps created can be deployed on both Android and iOS.

While cross-platform development saves time and cost, you risk sacrificing quality in the process. It is difficult to tailor an app that runs optimally on various platforms, and the app will need an additional abstraction layer when running, thus resulting in lower performance.

Startups will favor the reduction in time and cost with cross-platform development. However, you’ll need to bear in mind that it might be more difficult to customize the app beyond what’s allowed in the framework. Some of the popular hybrid apps are Instagram, Yelp, Uber, Amazon Store.

React Native has become the most prominent name to build complex hybrid apps delivering native user experiences due to its advanced features and ability to dive into native on each platform.

Pros of React Native App Development

• Minimized Development Time & Cost

React Native makes it easy to transfer the code between various mobile platforms. In other words, you can say that an application developed for Android on React Native can be easily compiled for an iOS app with a few minor changes. Since the single code base can be used on both platforms, it certainly minimizes the development time.

• Simple & Easy Maintenance

As native frameworks grow, the API of each framework grows. It was a time before React Native, where developers had to update my Android apps to use the latest tooling and losing time on iOS deployment. If your application is built in the native framework it can be quite time-consuming. However, React Native’s flexible approach makes the entire app development maintenance easy, simple yet price effective.

• Easier cross-device user experience

Mobile used to just have a few devices to worry about. Now we’re seeing variety among iOS and especially Android devices. React Native uses flexible and fully-optimized layout engines that are highly compatible across all the devices regardless of the screen size. Applications built with React Native adjust with screen resolutions. Apps built with React Native support HD graphics and device sizes.

• Easy third-party integrations

React Native has a way of synchronizing and integrating itself with native modules via frameworks and so it can easily be integrated with app features and other components such as GPS, camera etc. It happens because of internal device programming and thus eliminating the need for additional integration work for developers.

Most of these features get a JavaScript library that successfully unifies code in JavaScript by keeping the platform specifics well handled in free and open-source libraries.

Cons of React Native App Development 

• Documentation

Unfortunately, React Native inherits the main ReactJS disadvantage. The community is young so the available documentation is poor, especially for integration with additional tools.

• Third-party components

That said, React Native has a number of native modules for iOS and Android out-of-the-box, but the number of third-party components is still limited. And we can’t know for sure that community-built modules will be supported by the next releases of the framework. It remains a disadvantage because React Native doesn’t offer a wide spectrum of possible features that developers may want to implement in their apps.

• Lagging SDK Updates

React Native often drags its feet when iOS or Android updates their SDKs. React Native’s team should integrate a code library with new software. And despite the fact they work pretty fast, they cannot update every part of the APIs at once. That’s why the full synchronization between React Native and new SDKs often takes too long.

Cross-platform apps are easy and quick to build, but it’ll take more effort than native development to deliver an equivalent user experience on the respective platform.

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