Chapter 13. An introduction to React Native
This chapter covers
- An overview of React Native
- Differences between React and React Native
- Ways to learn more about React Native
At this point, you’ve been over the basics of using React, implemented a router, explored Redux, looked at server-side rendering, and even transitioned to using React Router. What’s left? There’s still plenty to learn and explore in the React ecosystem and community. This chapter takes a high-level look at React Native, another project in the React ecosystem developed by Facebook. With React Native, you can write React applications that run on mobile platforms like iOS and Android. This means you can write applications that run on smartphones and any other platforms that React Native targets now or in the future. React Native provides an excellent developer experience when building these mobile applications in a React-like way, and this is a large part of why it’s becoming increasingly important and popular in the React community.
Because React Native and getting started with mobile development encompass a substantially large domain, I’ll keep our discussion of React Native concise and focused mainly on higher-level concepts. By the end of the chapter, you should have an idea of what React Native is and why you might want to use it, and you’ll know how to get started on learning more about it.