Background

About one year and a half ago, MOXY began its journey in the domain of mobile apps engineering. Even before that, as professionals that build digital solutions for the web and continuously monitor industry trends, we were conscious the web is not always the most adequate target platform to deliver certain kind of products and experiences. At the time, new business opportunities in the mobile market started to present themselves when some of our clients approached us to develop apps for them. We then realized it was time to realign our strategy and decided to seriously invest in exploring the mobile technology scene and train our team to develop and design apps for handheld devices targeting iOS and Android.

If we were to invest resources in learning how to develop to mobile platforms, we were to do it the way right way.

Above all, our premise was that the commitment towards what our clients entrusted us to build and the quality bar we set upon ourselves would have to remain the same: to deliver impactful experiences, visual appealing and polished apps which make us proud and our clients happy.

As such, the mobile development framework of choice would have to ideally comply with the following criteria:

• Cross-platform: share a single code base across iOS and Android so we could ship faster and at a lower cost.
• Open-source: as an open-source driven company, the technology would have to be backed and maintained by an experienced and massive developer community.
• Maturity & stability: the technology would have already reached a stage where it has become reliable to be used in production without major hassles.
• Developer experience: the development and debugging tools would have to be easy and pleasant to use. Using the same tools, libraries and languages we already use daily to develop websites would be a major plus as well.
• Native capabilities: unlimited access to the native APIs which enable us to develop more specialized and sophisticated apps.
• Native-like performance: reasonable load times and smooth animations and transitions.

Why React Native?

React Native is an open-source cross-platform development framework created by Facebook and it was first released to the public in 2015. Armed with the possibility to build native apps using React, a UI library also created by Facebook, React Native’s popularity among web developers grew quickly, which led to the establishment of a thriving community and the proliferation of countless open-source libraries and learning material. Moreover, in the last five years, besides Facebook, several tech giants such as Uber, Microsoft and Shopify adopted React Native and continue to place their bets on it.

Naturally, it also deserved our attention.

As with everything in technology, our choices are motivated by trade-offs and risk is always involved. We ended up choosing React Native as it ticked the most boxes in our list of goals we set fourth above. The decisive factors behind our decision were:

• The dominance of JavaScript from the frontend to the backend in our tech stack.
• The long standing usage of React for our web development projects and how much we love it!
• The possibility to utilize tools and libraries we were already familiar with such as ESLint, Babel, Jest, Redux and React Intl, to name a few.
• Our proficiency in JavaScript and React as a whole.

Cross-platform development frameworks are very complex and none of them is perfect. React Native is no exception, but it continues to evolve with fast release cycles and has been getting better and better in the last couple of years. Furthermore, a major architectural shift, several performance improvements and optimizations are expected to land throughout this year. You can stay tuned by keeping an eye on the official blog for announcements and on the discussions and proposals repository to follow ongoing discussions and upcoming developments. Moreover, if you’re interested in having an outlook of the current state of React Native, feel free to check the article by LogRocket to learn more.

Beyond React Native, we did have a look at other contenders in the cross-platform space for native apps, namely Flutter and NativeScript, but, without disregarding their potential, both did not meet our criteria. Had we chosen to use Flutter, we would have to learn a new programming language, Dart, for core development and we determined such investment was not worth for us, at least for the time being. Spending time to learn, master and keep up with React Native, Android and iOS ecosystems was and still is enough of a challenge of its own. Thus, we put Flutter aside.

NativeScript, on the other hand, could have been a more interesting candidate as native APIs can be accessed from JavaScript seamlessly. Unlike React Native, where we have to write code in three different languages to bridge the JavaScript and the native realms, writing code in one language is a major upside from productivity and maintenance standpoints. Unfortunately, NativeScript lacked React support and still does to this day (only Angular and Vue are supported). React has been our library of choice for quite a while now, in which we heavily invested our team to consolidate its expertise; for this reason alone we discarded NativeScript as well, as it would not be convenient to switch to another stack.

#android #ios #react-native #mobile-app-development #react #mobile-apps #open-source #optimization