To start things off the question remains… Should businesses have to choose between creating an app that provides a better user experience, or an app that is faster to develop and can run on more platforms and devices?

With this ongoing debate of user experience and ease of development comes the new React Native technology as a solution built to render mobile UIs for both iOS and Android. Facebook introduced React Native as an open-source technology, with the idea that its compatibility with other platforms could be worked on by the development community.

React Native is focused solely on building a mobile UI. Usually, compared with JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS, React Native is UI focused… making it more like a JavaScript library than a framework. The resulting UI is highly responsive and feels fluid thanks to asynchronous JavaScript interactions with the native environment. This means the app will have load faster than a typical hybrid app, and have a smoother feel.

We recently built South Africa’s first React Native app, Names and Faces. This commercial cross-platform allows lower cost of ownership and development, but also provides superior native performance.





React Native brings the speed and agility of web app development to the hybrid space and does so with native results. Native apps are very specific to a given mobile platform and adopt the development tools and language that the respective platform supports.

Experts say that React Native brings better app performance, DOM abstraction, and simplified programming methods to hybrid mobile development. It is no wonder that React Native is quickly being adopted by a popular technology of choice by the development community.

React and React Native is released as a open-source framework which performs on par with any traditional native built apps. It is one of the key reasons we have been working with other leading financial services companies who have also selected React Native over other technologies.

In a nutshell, native apps provide the best usability, the best features, and the best overall mobile experience.

By Nick Durrant (MD), Bluegrass Digital