Quotes On React Native Development That Will Get You Inspired

Engineers, business leaders, coding beginners who wish to write their first app — the React Native development community welcomes all of them. The framework was created by people at Facebook, but currently, it’s supported by a huge number of devs from all around the world. React Native is, therefore, used so often not only because it offers an easy solution to cross-platform development but also because of the vibrant, supportive community built around it.

To give you some more insights into how the community views their beloved framework, we decided to gather a few quotes by some of the top-notch experts in the React Native development field. These are people who work with the framework on a daily basis — some of them by improving the same software for years, others by working on multiple projects every month in their React Native development agency. They are the real, day-to-day users of the framework, so they know their stuff.

And, as we are already talking about experts, we also encourage you to have a look at our list of some of the top blogs on React Native development.

For now, however, let’s jump right into the pool full of inspirational quotes on the framework!

From what I've seen of those that don't like React Native, the reasoning seems to be because it isn't a "write once, run anywhere" solution in the same way that other mobile solutions are. This means that, reusability aside, you wind up writing and maintaining three similar-but-different applications (web, Android, iOS). To many people this doesn't seem worthwhile, especially when there are solutions that are WORA that are already in use.

 

The difference, of course, is in the fact that React Native is... well... native. The WORA solutions that are currently in existence tend to describe their experiences as "mobile web hybrids" or something similar - but they aren't native experiences themselves.

Sean Grogg, Google’s User Experience Engineer answering the “Why are some people disappointed by React Native?” question on Quora

In short, I believe that mobile development is currently broken. Products today must be made for at least 3 platforms — the web, native iOS and native Android. If you look at the best apps from every category, they are implemented using native technologies. The engineers for every category usually have different skillsets, which creates “engineering silos” where the same product has to be implemented 3 different times. This is terribly inefficient.

 

Most companies developing mobile on the current native stacks must compromise in some way. Either on productivity (develop the same product multiple times with different engineers on different stacks), on quality (make low-quality apps) or on a scope (focus on a single platform). The path towards stopping these compromises is inventing new mobile stacks — like React Native.

Tal Kol, ex-Head of Mobile Engineering at Wix.com in an interview with React Amsterdam

Aside from building your app as two separate native apps, I don't think it's possible to have a better solution. React Native is getting more mature every release and it will take a long time for competitors (Google Flutter) to truly catch up, and the ability to use web technologies to build for native can be really beneficial. React has enough staying power that I think companies with less resources will stick with it for a long time to come, and hopefully it will be mature enough at some point that the next AirBnB chooses to stick with it.

Veranova on Reddit

I may have been biased by the novelty after years of heavyweight IDE’s and over-complicated languages, sure. Even if this is true I think that there’s a huge value in this “new” technology. React Native is not a solution to everything and it will probably not solve every demand that you might have with no effort, but it’s a fresh way of writing apps and a way that is gaining more and more momentum.

 

At this point, it’s quite hard for me to imagine a future without (at least) thinking of what React Native could do to help me build my apps.

Rui Magalhães in his “One month with React Native” blogpost

React Native is a great framework that bridges the gap between web and mobile. At Discord, it has brought us incredibly efficiency. It allows us to write reusable code, learn from each other, and move fast with a two-person team.

 

Although there are real pain points and challenges, the overall gains significantly outweigh the costs which motivates us to keep investing in the platform.

Funghao (Robin) Chen, Mobile Lead at Discord, in a blog post on the official Discord Medium blog

Early on at Discord, we adopted React Native as soon as it was open-sourced to build our iOS app from the core of our React app. Years later, we are still happy with that decision. Our iOS app currently sees many millions of monthly active users, is 99.9% crash-free, and holds a 4.8-star rating on the app store. React Native has been instrumental in allowing us to achieve this with a team of only three core iOS engineers!

One more quote from a Discord’s representative — this time Miguel Gaeta, the company’s Mobile Engineering Director and author of the “How Discord achieves native iOS performance with React Native” blogpost

React Native is pretty awesome - especially if you've got a web version of your app. At work, we use React Native for our iOS application - and are able to share pretty much all the store & action creators logic for our web (and desktop) app. It's been pretty huge as all our iOS engineer (we only have one!) really has to do is do the view specific stuff for iOS, the rest being shared with the web/desktop version. Also, our engineers that work on the web application can contribute to the iOS app with ease too.

 

Our general product iteration strategy involves building it on the web version and then porting it to iOS fairly quickly. For a chat application, our stores handle a lot of data, so it's been awesome to have that code shared.

 

React Native's bridge is also alright. We bridge with Component Kit for the chat messages view & WebRTC for the voice side of things fairly easy from JS.

 

Also, being able to update the bundle w/o doing an App Store update is pretty big too.

jhgg on Hacker News

We were able to ship Facebook’s first fully React Native app on two platforms, with native look and feel, built by the same team of JavaScript engineers. Not all of the engineers were familiar with React when they joined the team, yet they built an iOS app with native look and feel in just five months. And after an additional three months, we released the Android version of the app.

Daniel Witte and Philipp von Weitershausen, Facebook engineers in a blog post on the official Facebook Engineering blog

While there are other ways to build cross-platform native apps (like Flutter and Native Script) they all face the same challenges as React Native, but have not been around as long and don't have the same community support (from what I can tell).

 

In my opinion, the biggest reason React Native isn't going anywhere is because React as a framework is taking over web app development and makes life so much easier, and I can re-use that knowledge to make a native app. Using a different framework, or even coding an app natively, would require me to learn a whole new paradigm and maybe even a new programing language. I would much rather stick with my warm fuzzy React blanket.

TheTraceur on Reddit

I’ll definitely use React Native for my next app again - I can develop faster without the need to learn the Android API and, as the community grows, there will be more and more Native modules available. If there isn’t, I ‘ll look up how to do it in Android and create it myself, which I would have to do anyway if I were a native Android developer. So I don’t see a reason not to use React Native.

Christoph Michel on his blog

React Native brings the React paradigm to mobile app development. It’s goal isn’t to write the code once and run it on any platform. The goal is to learn-once (the React way) and write-anywhere. An important distinction to make.

Ray Wenderlich in the introduction to his React Native tutorial

Even if you are able to write native apps in Objective C, Swift, and Java, React Native still saves you an enormous amount of time. And you don't have to do everything in JavaScript.

 

I'm a web developer who got into native iOS development, and then I built an app with React Native. I was blown away by how much easier it is to build a cross-platform iOS and Android app. But I think it's also a much better choice even if you're just building an iOS app.

 

But you can't be afraid of writing your own native libraries in multiple languages or fixing bugs in open source projects. I built a write-once-deploy-anywhere app that runs on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows Desktop, and the web (with react-native-web). It was a pretty magical experience and I would do it again. There were lots of challenges and bugs to figure out, but I enjoyed it much more than working in XCode with Swift and UIKit.

 

I'll definitely be using React Native for any mobile apps in the future, even if I'm just targeting a single platform (e.g. ARKit on iOS). I just love building the UI with React and managing state with Redux.

nathan_f77 on Hacker News

We are modest, but also honest. And that’s why we are proudly calling also ourselves React Native experts. At Ideamotive, our React Native agency, we run various projects for our clients, many of them focused on mobiles and custom application development. Our founders are also developers which means we all understand the insides and outs of a developer’s life and working with React Native. This gives us a significant advantage over many other agencies.

If you wish to learn more about our work, feel free to reach out to receive a free quote on your next project.