Mobile Apps: Native Development Vs React-Native (What to choose for Cross-Platform apps)

What is Native App Development?

Native app development is the creation of applications that run on specific devices and platforms using the device’s SDK. Native mobile applications don’t run in the browser. User needs to download them from platform-specific app stores such as Apple’s App Store and Google Play. Both Apple and Google provide app developers with their own development tools, interface elements, and SDK

Pros of Investing in Native development:

API accessibility

All the features provided by Native development lags behind when the built-in functionality and APIs are integrated with the Native development ecosystem.

Availability of third-party libraries

There is availability of third-party libraries when creating an application using Native development. Android and iOS are fully-supported compared to their React Native counterparts because you’re free to select third-party libraries that suit your needs.

Parental support and security

There is support from the platform providers that gives Native technology the benefit of being dependable by putting a few steps ahead of the cross-platform competitors and providing reliable data protection.

Specialized for specific systems

A dedicated development platform gives better control over the environment and writes less code, so it becomes easier for you to debug the code and analyze troubleshooting. This is possible because of the Native development where you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues with any other system than iOS.

Large community of developers worldwide

Native technologies like iOS and Android are mature that allow you to access a vast knowledge base and palette of tools and solutions to learn from your mistakes instead of trial and error.

Cons of investing in Native development:

Development of two application

When you’re using Native mobile app development for your project, you can create an application for each platform separately without using Java. This is one of the common disadvantages of using Native development, so you have to invest in iOS app development and Android app development.

Consumes high development time and effort

Building an application with the Native frameworks requires many efforts and time that may slow down the development process. So if you plan to develop Android and iOS apps, you must create two applications separately because the app development happens from scratch twice by manifold.

What is React-Native App Development?

React-Native :

A widely used framework for mobile app development that allows you to develop amazing apps Using JavaScript. It is an open-source framework and the next big thing in mobile app development for a simpler and better user experience. React Native is said to be one of the choices for building cross-platform mobile applications over established hybrid tools like Cordova or Phone Gap.

A Facebook software engineer named Jordan Walke introduced React Native on 26 March 2015 as a new technology for Native development.

Pros of Investing in React Native Apps

Single codebase

React Native allows you to write single code that works for Android and iOS both. This means it becomes easier to maintain and reuse the same code, which requires fewer resources, efforts, and time.
However, there is no issue if the app looks the same on both platforms, then using React Native will speed up the entire development process.

Saves development time

As we know that you’re not required to write the same code twice for different platforms if you’re building an app using React Native. So it is apparent your 40% time is saved when creating a React Native app.

So from the start till the development process completes, it takes comparatively little time than Native app development.

Open-source framework

React Native is an open-source app development framework that comes with the benefit of examining the code. You can freely download and develop the entire application in real-time using its rich features as it is an open-source framework.

You have also got the opportunity to understand the React Native framework by analyzing the code and solving the errors if they come across any bugs in it.

Hot reloading

Hot reloading is one of the best features of React Native through which any mobile app development company can view every modification they’re making in the app on their screens in real-time.

All the files are saved automatically when you’re using React Native, and the output can be seen directly on the device after making any modifications. Here the effort reduces, as there is no need to reload the application again and again when the changes are done.

Cost-efficient solution

When creating an app, the cost can be reduced by 25% if you’re choosing React Native. The savings are done because we’ve just one development team instead of two, which means it will be easier for the project manager to control its uniformity.

Cons of Investing in React Native Apps:

With some powerful advantages, there also comes some disadvantages when developing apps with React Native. Here are a few disadvantages of React Native:

Lack of Native elements

The common disadvantage faced by most of the developers is that React Native doesn’t allow any mobile app development company to use the Native elements of your device, such as a Voice recorder and Camera.

Limited Third-Party Libraries

React Native development lags behind when comparing it with Native development as there are any severe lack of third-party libraries. If the development company is required to use the Native libraries, the incorporation should be made in Native modules that increase development efforts.

No Support for All Native APIs

There are significant updates introduced by React Native, like debugging tools in the latest versions, but there are still some restrictions in using some APIs.

Factors to Consider Before Building a Business Mobile App

App Development time

With Native, you’re required to run the entire application whenever you edit your code, which needs extra effort and time to build a mobile app using Native development.

In React Native, the single code is suitable for both the platforms, which means you can quickly develop Android and iOS applications using the same code. Additionally, React Native addressed the feature of Hot Reloading that makes it easier for you to deploy the application and reduces the efforts and time required to develop React Native applications.

App Performance

Performance is the main factor for every business, whether it is a startup or an enterprise-level organization. React Native cannot perform multiple tasks simultaneously as it only works with JavaScript and does not support trending modules and functionalities.

In Native app development, the applications are developed using Java, Swift, or Kotlin which are better than JavaScript and allows you to create various types of Native applications easily.

Intuitive UI/UX experience

Intuitive UI/UX experience is another factor that can help you to examine which is better React Native or Native for your project. React Native allows you to reuse the code functionality when creating a complex UI such as navigation patterns and custom views.

In Native mobile app development, every screen is designed individually for iOS and Android devices for higher mobile app UI/UX experience.

Scalability

React Native offers excellent features with a comprehensive set of opportunities when creating an app with higher-functionality compared to Native mobile app development, so the clear winner is React Native in terms of scalability.

Interaction with native apps

If you’re choosing Native app development, you can easily communicate with other Native apps and access their data. Whereas, it is not possible to React Native development because they rely on third-party libraries to interact with other Native apps.

API and third-party libraries support

If you need to access all the APIs and perform related tasks, then you should choose Native development.

As React Native only allows you to use a few APIs and build a connection layer with Native technologies.

App Security

React Native uses JavaScript, which is not strongly typed like Native mobile app development, i.e., Kotlin, Java, Objective-C, and Swift.

So it makes React Native less secured compared to Native mobile app development.

Mobile app development cost

If cost is your main concern, you must select React Native development for your project as it saves upto 35% cost compared to Native mobile app development.

As we have understood, what kind of advantages you can get if you opt for Native app development or React Native app development for your project.

When to choose React Native for Mobile App Development?

  • When you’re planning to build a small and simple application.
  • When you want to use React Native that can build uniform applications.
  • When you want to complete the entire application in a short time.
  • When you want to create a new e-commerce application or any social media application like Instagram and Facebook.
  • When your budget is limited and don’t want to invest more on the project.
  • When you have a limited budget and want to invest less on the project

When to choose Native for mobile app development?

  • When you’re planning to develop a complex application.
  • When you want to make an application-focused more on Native users.
  • When you’re required to update your users regularly.
  • When you want to develop an IoT friendly application.
  • When you want to build an app for a specific platform only.

JavaScript Frameworks/ Libraries: which one you should use to build web apps.

Over my 14+ years of my working experience there have been many JavaScript frameworks. But i’ll discuss : React, Angular, Ember, Knockout and JQuery

You might know already because there are so many JavaScript frameworks for frontend developers and it’s challenging to make up their minds about which JavaScript application framework to choose.

Let’s take a look at JavaScript frameworks comparison in the following table:

FrameworksType
React / ReactJSLibrary
Angular/ AngularJSFramework
EmberJSFramework
KnockoutJSLibrary
JQueryLibrary

React

Created by Facebook, the React framework has earned popularity within a short period. It is used to develop and operate the dynamic User Interface of the web pages with high incoming traffic. It makes the use of a virtual DOM, and hence, the integration of the same with any application is more straightforward.

Features

Declarative: Creates interactive and dynamic UI for websites and mobile applications. React updates efficiently and render the right components when data changes. Declarative views make the code readable and easy to debug.

Virtual DOM: For every DOM object, there is a corresponding “virtual DOM object.” It creates a virtual copy of the original DOM and is a representation of a DOM object,

Event handling: React has its fully compatible W3C object model event system created. It also provides a cross-browser interface to a native event, meaning no need to worry about incompatible event names and fields. React reduces memory head by as event system is implemented through event delegation and has a pool of event objects.

JSX: JSX is a markup syntax that closely resembles HTML. JSX makes writing React components, easier by making the syntax almost identical to the HTML that is injected into the web page.

Performance: React uses one-way data binding with an application architecture called Flux controls. ReactJS helps update the View for the user and, Flux controls the application workflow. Virtual DOM adds advantages as it compares the new data with original DOM and updates the View automatically.

React Native: React Native is a custom renderer for React; it uses native components instead of web components like React as building blocks. It also serves access to the features these platforms offer, apart from transforming React code to work on iOS and Android.

Component-Based: In React, everything is a component of the web page divided into small components to create a view(or UIs). Every part of the application visuals would be wrapped inside a self-contained module known as a component. Components in ReactJS use to define the visuals and interactions in applications.

Angular

One of the most powerful, efficient, and open-source JavaScript frameworks is Angular. Google operates this framework and is implemented to use for developing a Single Page Application (SPA). It extends the HTML into the application and interprets the attributes to perform data binding.

When you build an application with Angular, you break your app up into multiple components with nested, or child, components. Each Angular component is broken into three files. The business logic for a component is written in the main file, whereas the layout and styles related to this component are written in the other two files.

Apart from Angular components, you have to get used to services, the dependency injection framework (React doesn’t have dependency injection), and directives (special HTML attributes). In the simplest terms, Angular wants you to design frontend apps in a prescribed way, unlike React.

Features

Progressive Web Apps: Modern web platform capabilities to deliver app-like experiences that are high performance, offline, and zero-step installation.

Native: Strategies from Cordova, Ionic, or NativeScript are used to build the native app.

Desktop: Desktop-installed apps across Mac, Windows, and Linux can be created using the same Angular methods as for the web plus the ability to access native OS APIs.

Code Generation: Angular turns templates into code that’s highly optimized for JavaScript virtual machines, giving benefits of hand-written code.

Universal: Serve the first view of the application on Node.js, .NET, PHP, and other servers for near-instant rendering in just HTML and CSS.

Code Splitting: With the new Component Router, angular apps load quickly, delivering automatic code-splitting. So users load code required to render the view they request.

Templates: Create UI views with simple and powerful template syntax.

Angular CLI: Command line tools: start building fast, add components and tests, then instantly deploy.

Testing: Protractor makes your scenario tests run faster and in a stable manner.

Animation: Create high-performance, complex choreographies, and animation timelines with very little code through Angular’s intuitive API.

Ember

Ember is, arguably, one of the most difficult JavaScript frameworks for frontend web development. Ember has a relatively intricate architecture, which, nevertheless, will allow you to quickly build huge client-side applications. It realizes a typical MVC JavaScript framework, and Ember’s architecture comprises the following parts: adapters, components, controllers, helpers, models, routes, services, templates, utils, and addons.

Every part of Ember has a narrow focus. For example, Ember helpers are used to manipulate data before rendering them to the screen. Ember components are used to store logic for the app, and various buttons to manipulate the view are stored in components.

One of Ember’s best features is its command line interface tool. The Ember CLI helps you be very productive: you can not only create new projects with ready setups, but also create components, controllers, and other project files from the terminal using automatic generation – and even install third-party dependencies. No wonder that Ember CLI was also the inspiration for Angular CLI.

Features

Future of web development: With the help of the Babel JavaScript transpiler, Ember allows developers to use future JavaScript standards and transpile them for use in today’s browsers. Don’t know what Babel is? Babel is a JavaScript transpiler that lets developers use next-generation JavaScript into their code now. Also, Babel benefits from numerous plugins and is compatible with frameworks like Ember, Rails, Sails, and Meteor.

Ember CLI: Ember and Ember-CLI are two different things entirely, but neither would be totally whole without the other. Ember-CLI is a command-line utility that comes along with the Ember framework’s software stack. Ember-CLI is a productivity rocket ship, with support for tools like CoffeeScript, Handlebars, LESS, and Sass.

Ember template: Built into Ember’s UI are Ember’s templates, which are written with the Handlebars templating language. Handlebars is named for its use of double curly brackets and it allows developers to use way less code. Templates make a lot of features possible in Ember, like Components, Outlets, and Expressions.

CoC: The sole purpose of the convention is the speed and the “Get Stuff Done” philosophy which is a massive boost for the startups who always battle hard to outpace their competitors. Ember has well-defined best practices for how it is structured. This means developers can focus more on their apps’ functionality and unique features, and less on reinventing the wheel with tedious code. There’s more building, and less blueprinting.

Testing: QUnit, a testing JavaScript framework used with Ember.

Ember Inspector: A development tool for Chrome and Firefox

KnockoutJS

KnockoutJS is a standalone open source JavaScript framework adopting a Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern with templates.

Features

Declarative binding: Knockout’s declarative binding system provides a concise and powerful way to link data to the UI. It’s generally easy to bind to simple data properties or to use a single binding, allows implementing custom behaviors as new declarative bindings for easy reuse in just a few lines of code.

Built-in Templating: Knockout.js provides DOM-based templating and by default uses HTML as its templating engine. But, it also supports other string-based templating. Templating allows applications to render views that are modular and reusable. With Knockout.js, one can perform DOM or string-based templating for modularizing views and rendering them in a programmed way. Knockout.js also allows creating templates to render HTML for a single element or for every element in an array. This makes code organization pretty neat.

Two-way Data Binding: Its two-way data binding mechanism between data model and UI means that any changes done to the data model are automatically reflected in the UI and vice versa. UI elements of an HTML page reflect changes done to the Data Model by updating DOM automatically. Moreover, Knockout.js allows managing the relationships between the view components.

Dependency Tracking: Knockout.js automatically tracks dependencies and updates the right parts of the user interface. It offers a simple way to manage complex, data-driven interfaces without relying on or writing event handlers and listeners for dependency tracking.

Observables are the core essence of Knockout.js. They are JavaScript objects notifying subscribers about changes and automatically detecting dependencies.

In Knockout.js, computed observables are used to define data fields. Declarative bindings are simply implemented as computed observables. So, when a binding reads the value of an observable, it causes the binding to re-evaluate if the observable changes.

No Dependencies: Knockout.js has no dependencies and it works without jQuery, Prototype.js or any other JavaScript library.

jQuery

One of the oldest JS frameworks is Jquery. This framework has been around for over 12 years and it’s still going strong. So, what is jQuery?

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library created by John Resig in 2006 with a nice motto, Write less, do more. It is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. Currently, over 19 million websites are using jQuery! Companies like WordPress, Facebook, Google, IBM and many others rely on jQuery to provide a one of a kind web browsing experience.

Features

DOM Manipulation: It makes it extremely easy to manipulate DOM enabling developers to do amazing things and using the best of their creativity through easy-to-learn API, which is built on the top JavaScript.

AJAX support: In short, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is about loading data in the background and display it on the webpage, without reloading the whole page. jQuery provides several methods for AJAX functionality. With the jQuery AJAX methods, you can request text, HTML, XML, or JSON from a remote server using both HTTP Get and HTTP Post.

Conclusion

Check project requirements before choosing Javascript framework for application as every framework comes with unique features that you may require during development.  Apart from the features, also consider the learning curve, complexity, compatibility documentation.