React Native Pros and Cons

Cons:

• You can’t use Android Studio anymore
• React Native can’t be used for every application or feature
• React Native is a novel framework and updates can have a negative effect on your current codebase
• JavaScript isn’t a strictly typed language
• React Native requires a JavaScript engine to run, which may make it less performant

Pros:

• Easy to learn
• A shared codebase between Android and iOS apps, with only minor tweaks required to match platform experiences
• Live and hot reloading, meaning no more infinite build times
• Native components for both platforms
• Constantly improving
• Actively growing community
• Huge number of libraries
• Expo removes the need to own a Mac to develop for iOS
• Reduction in labor resources—while you may still need some Android/iOS native development, it will be infrequent.

I can go on and on, but let’s stop here and move on to the topic of this blog post. In this post, I’m going to create four React Native powered Android apps:

1. A basic counter with buttons to increment and decrement the counter
2. An app to search the r/pics subreddit
3. A generic login page
4. An app to browse the r/pics subreddit