React Native is the Future of Mobile at Ecommerce

Juned Ghanchi
Product Coalition
Published in
4 min readJun 18, 2020

--

Image Source: kriss.io

React Native is one of the leading cross-platform app development frameworks that have been used for various applications across the spectrum for some years. React Native is not just a framework to develop apps that work on both iOS and Android. Still, it is also a technology that ensures delivering highly native or platform-specific user experience. React Native after being developed and launched by Facebook back in 2011, it continued to become popular, and over the years, it has been used for mobile apps across all niches and categories.

In recent years, React Native has also become a popular framework for building simple and effective mobile e-commerce stores. Thanks to the cross-platform capabilities, native user experience, reusability of the code, and a host of third-party tools, React Native has the edge over other frameworks for building cross-platform native apps. React Native has been used for building a whole array of leading apps across diverse niches, including UberEats, Microsoft OneDrive, Walmart, Flipkart, Skype, Instagram, and many others.

Most Important Reasons for Developers to Use React Native

Over the years, React Native as a cross-platform framework remained hugely popular because of a number of reasons. Several advantages give React Native an edge over other cross-platform technologies. Let us explain here some of the key reasons for developers to prefer React Native.

Robust Community Support

React Native from the very beginning has been a community-driven technology. Though Facebook developers were working on this for years, the framework was shaped actually through a hackathon competition held in 2013. The findings from the event correctly addressed several long-hand concerns of the native app developers. In 2014, when the framework was finally launched, it provided the agility and flexibility of the React environment for native app developers.

React Native developers always enjoy the support and push from a huge number of native developers and JavaScript experts who are always ready to share their code and expertise for their development projects. React Native app developers get free access to an overwhelming number of ready to use components continuously created and updated by the React Native community.

Optimum Code Reusability Resulting in Lower Cost

React Native allows the developers to use the same code across all platforms. You can reuse the code for app versions on both iOS and Android while maintaining the platform-specific native functionalities and user experience throughout. This directly makes an impact in lowering the development efforts and costs. As evident from multiple cross-platform app development projects using React Native, 90% of the code can now be reused across iOS and Android platforms.

The modular architecture of React Native also allows developers to utilize components from other projects. This further extends the reusability of the code across projects. This is why, for specific features and functions, React Native developers often can just use readily available components from various repositories.

Live Reload Feature

React Native also implements some core React ideas to deliver features missing with other native application development frameworks. The Live Reload feature is a nice example of this value addition. Thanks to the Live Reload feature, developers can instantly see the impact of the changes they made to the application code. This, on the one hand, ensures a faster pace of development and, on the other hand, facilitates development with the least errors. Live Reload feature allows developers to open two windows side by side, one depicting the code and the other showing the mobile app screen with the effects of the changes.

Optimum Performance and Speed

Apart from all the help and benefits for the developers and project management, React Native also comes with an architecture that remains suitably tuned to mobile platforms and devices. It utilizes a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in contrast to the native platforms that use CPU (Central Processing Unit), and these results in faster loading speed and performance for the React Native apps.

Why use React Native for Developing Ecommerce Mobile Apps?

Is React Native a great technology for building mobile e-commerce apps as well? First of all, being a cross-platform framework React Native allows extending the reusability of components and code across mobile platforms and the web. There are several other practical advantages like the faster speed of development impaired to native development. Mobile e-commerce apps that are increasingly becoming competitive in terms of development cost find React Native as the ideal technology.

Let us have a quick look at the practical benefits of React Native for building ecommerce apps.

  • The cross-platform capability of React Native helps small businesses to build e-commerce apps for all mobile users at a small budget.
  • The e-commerce apps by using React Native don’t need to compromise with the platform-specific user experience.
  • Thanks to the Hot Reload feature, React Native helps e-commerce businesses make updates in real-time.
  • Thanks to the reusability of code, e-commerce stores gain competitive gain with a faster time to market.

If you have a business website and want to turn it into native mobile apps for leading mobile platforms such as iOS and Android, React Native is the right technology to start with. An ecommerce website or an app typically has three principal screens, such as the home page, checkout page, and receipt page. By using React Native, you can easily utilize your core UI elements in mobile apps and build these e-commerce specific sections along with basic features such as product pages with filters, e-cart, payment gateway, location map, customer forms, recommendation engine, chatbot support, etc.

Conclusion

Over the years, React Native has emerged as a widely popular technology for building cross-platform apps with native UX attributes. Now the effectiveness of the framework for developing highly functional e-commerce apps is also coming to the fore. IndianAppDevelopers have been at the forefront of e-commerce app development by utilizing the React Native framework’s power.

--

--

Juned Ahmed is an IT consultant by profession and is working with IndianAppDevelopers, a leading Android app development company.