Understanding cross-platform software development

Before talking about React Native, we need to go over the landscape of mobile app development.

It is quite obvious that mobile apps can be created using native platform programming languages. The ones considered most modern are Swift, for iOS development, and Kotlin, for Android development. Many developers still use Objective-C and Java, respectively. However, when the market of mobile phones settled down with the two giants, Apple and Google, it was tempting to create solutions that could be written once for both platforms. Similarly, for websites, which can be opened in any browser, why can’t we have apps that can be run on any device?

Looking for this mythical cross-platform solution was enticing to many companies. They were hiring separate teams from iOS and Android to end up with apps that do not look and feel the same.

The software development world is vast, and we can find many solutions to a single problem. Cross-platform development is not an exception to this rule. If you google cross-platform apps, you will find a solution from Microsoft, called Xamarin. You will also find Flutter, written in a language called Dart. And finally, you will find many solutions based on JavaScript. One of the first meaningful players was Ionic. Ionic is a framework, built in 2013, for development in AngularJS, and it uses Apache Cordova behind the scenes. Ionic developers build their apps using the exact same syntax they would use to create a website. At build time, a native app wrapper with a single WebView is created. The Ionic code is run inside this WebView. Given this structure, many people call Ionic apps hybrid apps to differentiate them from cross-platform apps.

React Native is a completely different solution. In its case, code is compiled into a complete native app. JavaScript code runs in the app and communicates with the phone’s native modules through a bridge. But where did React Native come from, you may ask?

Let’s dive into that topic in our next section.