React Native is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

software framework In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software, providing generic functionality, can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. It provides a standard ...

created by Meta Platforms, Inc. It is used to develop applications for Android,

Android TV Android TV is a smart TV operating system based on Android (operating system), Android and developed by Google for television sets, digital media players, set-top boxes, and soundbars. A successor to Google TV (operating system), Google TV, it fe ...

, iOS,

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

tvOS tvOS (formerly known as Apple TV Software) is an operating system developed by Apple Inc. for the Apple TV, a digital media player. In the first-generation Apple TV, Apple TV Software was based on Mac OS X. Starting with the second-generation, ...

Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

and UWP by enabling developers to use the

React REACT or React may refer to: Science and technology * REACT (telescope), a telescope at Fenton Hill Observatory, New Mexico, US Computing * React (JavaScript library) , a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, from Facebook ** React Nat ...

framework along with native platform capabilities. It is also being used to develop virtual reality applications at

Oculus Oculus (a term from Latin ''oculus'', meaning 'eye'), may refer to the following Architecture * Oculus (architecture), a circular opening in the centre of a dome or in a wall Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Oculus'' (film), a 2013 American s ...

History

In 2012

Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), of ...

commented, "The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

as opposed to native". Using HTML5 for Facebook's mobile version resulted in an unstable application that retrieved data slowly. He promised

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...

would soon deliver a better mobile experience. Inside Facebook, Jordan Walke found a way to generate UI elements for iOS from a background

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

thread, which became the basis for the React web framework. They decided to organize an internal

Hackathon A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of hacking and marathon) is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. Th ...

to perfect this

prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and software programming. A prototype is generally used to ...

in order to be able to build native apps with this technology. In 2015, after months of development, Facebook released the first version for the React JavaScript Configuration. During a technical talk, Christopher Chedeau explained that Facebook was already using React Native in production for their Group App and their Ads Manager App.

Implementation

The working principles of React Native are virtually identical to

except that React Native does not manipulate the DOM via the

Virtual DOM A virtual DOM is a lightweight JavaScript representation of the Document Object Model (DOM) used in declarative web frameworks such as React, Vue.js, and Elm. Updating the virtual DOM is comparatively faster than updating the actual DOM (via Jav ...

. It runs in a

background process A background process is a computer process that runs ''behind the scenes'' (i.e., in the background) and without user intervention. Typical tasks for these processes include logging, system monitoring, scheduling, and user notification. The backgr ...

(which interprets the

written by the developers) directly on the end-device and communicates with the native platform via serialized data over an

asynchronous Asynchrony is the state of not being in synchronization. Asynchrony or asynchronous may refer to: Electronics and computing * Asynchrony (computer programming), the occurrence of events independent of the main program flow, and ways to deal wit ...

and batched bridge. React components wrap existing native code and interact with native APIs via React's declarative UI paradigm and

. While React Native styling has a similar syntax to CSS, it does not use

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...

. Instead, messages from the JavaScript thread are used to manipulate native views. Without React Native, developers have to write native code in the languages of the aimed platform such as

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

or Kotlin for Android,

Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXT ...

Swift Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to: * SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks ** SWIFT code * Swift (programming language) * Swift (bird), a family of birds It may also refer to: Organizations * SWIFT, ...

for iOS, and

C++/WinRT C++/WinRT is a C++ library for Microsoft's Windows Runtime platform, designed to provide access to modern Windows APIs. C++/WinRT is provided as a standard C++17 header file library, unlike C++/CX, which is an extension to C++ and requires a recen ...

or C# for

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on ...

. React Native is also available for both

and

, which is currently maintained by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

Hello World example

A Hello, World program in React Native looks like this: import from 'react-native'; import * as React from 'react'; const HelloWorldApp = () => export default HelloWorldApp; AppRegistry.registerComponent('HelloWorld', () => HelloWorldApp);

History

Implementation

Hello World example

See also