Well, this day has come
Last week two different customers asked about cross-platform development and were quite actively interested in the differences between React Native and hybrid development. Today we will tell you more about React Native than the coolness of React Native and how it allows you to spend 1.5-2 times less money on programming mobile applications.
Won’t it slow you down?
The first questions that arise are: how will my application work? Will it be noticeable to the user that it is not native? The answer is clear: the application will work exactly the same as any native one. You can’t tell the difference between an application on React Native and an ordinary one if the developer doesn’t tell you. This is due to the fact that all components are actually used “native” from their platforms, and the reaction is used mainly to organize the logic. Below you will see a video recording of one of our applications. This is the private office of one of the largest telecom operators.
You’ re the developer? You’ll earn even more!
If you are a developer yourself, the technology will allow you to make 1.5-2 times more applications at the same time. That is, with fixed payment for the project, you will earn 1.5-2 times more.
First, I’ll give you some introductory information about the alternatives to RN that we had time to try and learn before we finally switched to React Native. The following will describe the pros and cons of the technology (from the point of view of the customer and the development manager). And finally, for the most curious people, I will reveal the secret of how everything works “from the inside”. The technology appeared in Facebook in 2015 and quickly gained popularity. Already in 2016, we switched over to it completely and for three years of work we have never regretted it. However, the choice was not made at once. We have managed to work out and study various alternatives that were encountered in the mobile development market in the period from 2010 to 2016.
First cross-platform applications
The first attempts to write one code for two platforms started almost immediately with the advent of mobile applications.
Even so: the first applications were just web pages that opened in the browser, but Apple and Google refused this practice, because everything did not work well.
Until 2012, we developed websites and complex web applications on Adobe Flash and our first mobile applications were also on Adobe Flash (now Animate). It allows you to do a frame-by-frame animation on a timeline and make this application for two platforms. It was very convenient for presentations, but there were two significant drawbacks:
- Everything was slow and there was no such pleasant feeling as using native applications;
- Flash didn’t have any nice, ready-made interface elements and everything had to be drawn from scratch. It took a lot of time and money and negated all the savings from the common code for the two platforms.
However, despite these disadvantages, gaming companies continued to use Adobe Flash / Adobe Animate for a long time to create games, because this platform has hardware 3d-acceleration, which with a huge amount of additional effort allowed to get a really smooth animation on mobile devices. The Unity platform also works in a similar way. Next we will tell you about one more interesting alternative, and then we will describe in detail all the advantages and disadvantages of React Native.
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