Tom Goldenberg and Nicholas Alan Brown

React Native is the most exciting thing to happen to app development in years. By letting developers write smooth, responsive, and performant apps in Javascript, Facebook has made iOS and Android accessible to web developers in a whole new way.

Excited by the technology and about diving into mobile development, Nick and I designed and built Bhagavad Gita App, a simple yet beautiful experience for reading the popular Hindu text. Even though the project was fairly low-complexity, we were still surprised at how few good learning resources we could find for React Native when getting started.

In addition to founding the React Native NYC meetup to help support the rapidly growing community and provide opportunities for developers to learn from one another’s experiences with the bleeding-edge framework, we’ve decided to create a more complex demo app and a companion ebook tutorial to share everything we’ve learned.

Though I’ve outlined some of the “gotchas” we’ve run across in a previous post, there’s just so much more to share. Today, we’re open-sourcing our work-in-progress demo app, Assemblies, a Meetup clone themed for the developer community.