React Native is a cross-platform development tool built on the foundation of React by Facebook to support smartphones. And mobile-based development systems. It was first developed by Facebook in 2013, as a hackathon program within Facebook and then released to the public in the year 2015. It quickly gained a lot of traction within the developer community and many app development NYC companies embraced the platform as their mobile app development tool since React Native apps share one codebase for iOS as well as Android and cannot be distinct from native apps.

What is React Native?

Are you interested in getting familiar with React Native? Let’s create the first application using React Native, a simple application that displays an alphabetical list of countries pulled via a REST API using the network request. This React Native tutorial is aimed to give you the foundation of what you must learn before you can build a application. Then, we move on to help you create your first React Native app. At the end of this article, you’ll develop a React Native app that can use on both iOS as well as Android devices.

• React Native is a hybrid mobile development library.
• It’s applications were written using JSX or Javascript and then converted to native code.
• Native apps have 85 to 90 percent in common Javascript along with JSX code.

What exactly is what is React Native and what is it not?

• It isn’t an internet browser
• React Native is not React.
• It isn’t PWA
• React Native as of this writing supports web development by using React Native for Web.

Why should you learn about React Native?

• Targets different operating systems (iOS, Android, Web, and TVOS) with the same base of code and effort.
• There is a growing and large community that offer adequate assistance
• Native support means that you can modify your native application to meet your business needs and use-case
• It requires an understanding of JavaScript. JavaScript is a programming language in great demand, and learning it will yield huge benefits.
• Features a feature that I consider to be the sweet spot Speed Refresh (Hot Reloading)

React Native Drawbacks?

React Native has some drawbacks also, however, the developers of this library are constantly working to improve it as the community grows

The codebase is shared between different platforms, understanding of native development may be required when creating more advanced React Native projects

Given that many React Native apps look similar to native apps, React Native seems to lack the smoothness of navigation offered by native apps.

* React Native developers agree that React Native style of error reporting isn’t the best however they can deal with it with time.

Create The First Native React App Native App:

Let’s create the React Native app to display an easy listing of nations. The app will have only one screen. We intend to limit its style and functionality to a minimum since the goal of this article is just to assist you to create a React Native developer environment. Also, explore the React Native programming language.

For this React Native tutorial, we will be using Expo to create your very first React Native application. Expo is a great tool for new to React Native. Expo is a great tool for beginners in React Native world since it allows you to run and test React Native apps on your devices with ease.

1. Install Expo:

Read the official documentation for the steps to installing Expo. Once you’ve installed Expo, return to this guide to follow these steps to create the first React Native app.

2. Create a new React Native App. Native App:

Expo initiate the first app

Choose the blank ‘project

Select ‘Y’ to work with the yarn.

Plain Text

Yarn v1.19.2 discovered. Utilize Yarn for installing dependencies? (Y/n)

After you click Yes, Expo will work to make all the required documents for you. Take a look at the structure of the directory to understand what’s happening within the project.

3. Run Your First React Native App:

If you have set up Expo correctly in the earlier steps, the newly created React Native project should have been successfully loaded and you should be able to view the application as shown in the screenshot below:

Here’s the first React Native application that you’ve built. Its default message is “Open App.js to begin working on your app’. I’m sure that’s not the most welcoming message Expo could provide however we’ll proceed as they suggest.

Now let me provide an overview of what’s happening before we continue.

* The variable’s styles contain diverse style dictations of the components

* Function App is a React Native Functional Component, the default app that renders what we see on our screen. Also below are statements of import which are used to import components as well as compiled into a parent App.

4. Add Countries to the List:

Let’s continue and modify this screen using our user interface. We mentioned earlier that we’ll display the list of countries.

As you will see, we’ve upgraded Our App.js with a couple of new features:

• A Flat list that displays the countries listed.
• A mock dataset to display, to be shown in the list
• We changed the style object to include the style we use for our text

You should run your app if haven’t already started it and you’re looking at this:

We now have a data source that we can work on. However, the data is not dynamic and we’d like to have a more dynamic list that is subject to change and those changes need to be displayed in the user interface. Therefore, we require to design the UI to become “reactive” to changes to the data model. This is the basic idea of React and React Native. Therefore, we must introduce the concept of the State.

The React Native component stores information in its state and when the status changes. It’s user interface is refresh to reflect the changes. Let’s create the state variable named countries.

Don’t be afraid of what’s happening. We’re employing the fetch API to fetch data about countries through the API endpoint and display a list of African countries. The fetch API lets you can make network requests in React Native. As you’ll notice the fetch API is free. We’ve used an API endpoint that is available through the rest countries.EU website. It returns a JSON object that is parsed using the then() clause of the fetch method. After successful parsing then we modify the countries. State variable Data updates with the latest list of countries. Which we have discovered. In the process of updating the state object. The UI also gets refresh and we can view the countries display on the screen:

5. How to Style the first Native app you’ve ever used:

We’ll now concentrate on making the appearance of the app a bit better because we already have the basic functions in place. We will concentrate on the design of the app, and we will focus on the style dictionary.

You can see that we’ve altered the background’s color to purple, and we’ve provided our background Color attribute with the ‘#483D8B #483D8B’ hex code.

Although the syntax is similar to CSS it’s a bit different. However, the fundamental principles are the same and if you already are familiar with CSS knowing how to design React Native apps will be very simple. Particularly if you’re familiar with the layout of flexbox.

Conclusion:

We, SoftCircles, LLC as a Mobile App Development Company in New York have set up Expo that is an incredible tool for those who are just beginning to learn about React Native. React Native world. We then leveraged Expo to create our first React Native project. Congratulations! You’ve been able to create a React Native app. Now, it’s time to master more advanced concepts so that you can enhance the functionality and build fully functional mobile apps which you can release for the App Store and the Google Play Store. Look through this list of the top React Native resources to learn more about React Native and dive into the next step.