All you want to know about React Native, but you were afraid to ask

Let’s face it, building a React Native App is an expansive task with file system access, background downloads, and push notifications.If you are still considering as to why React Native is the most discernible choice of framework for your next mobile app, here is a list of the all you want to know about React Native but are afraid to ask. We selected and answered the most common questions that pop up when people consider using React Native in a project.

1. Why React Native?
If you want to change course from a web app to a mobile app, you do this for three key reasons to have very elaborate offline & background functionality, to deliver a native-like experience and to turn this back into a Progressive Web App (PWA) if needed.

2. Is React the same as React Native?
Firstly, it isn’t a fair comparison. React Native is not a different version of React. React Native uses React. React is meant to work on the web, whereas React Native is meant to create native apps using a syntax you already know. It’s not the idea to share functionalities among both libraries (there are, of course), but to use something you already know to create something you don’t know. It’s a modified tool to do what wasn’t meant to do initially. On the web, plain React eventually generates an HTML-based website. This is how you can use CSS and directly call DOM functions on your components. Native is a bit of a different beast. Despite using React's syntax – and unlike libraries like Cordova – RN never gives you HTML, or DOM Elements or CSS, but rather orchestrates native views directly on your mobile OS. This is amazing because it means your UI is truly native.

3. Will my React app work on mobile? Will my React Native app work on Web?
Unfortunately, the answer to this one is NO.Most of the React code for Web relies on features available in Web browsers, so it will not work on mobile and vice versa – React Native code relies on the features available on a given mobile platform. The good news is that we can still reuse some code between the mobile and web apps, and the ability to reuse the code will improve in the future.

4. Is Flutter better than React Native?
Flutter, as a reactive framework, has excellent performance and is easy to learn, lets you build applications which look like native ones, and offers hot reloading. Nevertheless, React Native is still the industry standard for cross-platform mobile development. By using JavaScript, a far more popular language than Dart (which Flutter uses), it can be more easily adopted by developers.

5. Will React Native make my app look and run the same way on IOS and Android?

IOS and Android offer different sets of features, and it's not React Native’s responsibility to make these environments equal. React Native is only a way of accessing the native components in iOS and Android. Most of the time – with some effort – we can make apps on both platforms look the same, but we shouldn't. We should stick to platform guidelines when it comes to user interface. Luckily, React Native provides us with an easy way to adapt the UI to the given platform’s needs.
The future is bright, and it belongs to React and React Native. Happy Coding.