Why These 8 Global Companies Are Using React Native in Their Apps

React Native has become a popular name in the software development ecosystem. It’s an open-source cross-platform development framework that Facebook released in 2015. Because of its highly tempting advantages, many companies, big and small, have used React Native for their mobile apps. After I briefly explain the major benefits of React Native in the first section, the second section of this blog will present a list of 8 big companies using React Native in their apps.

Why is React Native Used? Top React Native Advantages

1. Faster development with high code-sharing capabilities

React Native allows developers to use the same code base for both Android and iOS apps. It’s a complete multi-platform solution for businesses that want a short time-to-market. All you need to do is hire React Native developer proficient in hybrid app designing. Based on your requirements, you can then build a feature-rich cross-platform app in just 3-4 weeks.

2. Save development costs and time while building an MVP

Prototyping in React Native is super quick. If you are a startup, you can build an MVP with React Native and save tons of development time and costs. There is a myriad of open-source UI-component libraries available for building React Native apps. So you don’t need to build the UI of your app from scratch. This has led to many big companies using React Native for their apps.

3. Increased developer velocity

Code reusability in React Native makes catching and debugging errors very easy. Moreover, resolving the issues for both Android and iOS apps can happen with a single solution.

Secondly, React Native doesn’t make developers wait for app recompilation every time they make a change in the code. Hot reloading makes code upgrades much faster than other frameworks without this feature.

Why These 8 Global Companies Are Using React Native in Their Apps

From social networking to food delivery, many corporate giants have adopted React Native for some parts of their apps. Here is a list of 8 big companies that are using React Native for a while now. I have also mentioned how these companies have benefitted from the cross-platform development framework.

1. React Native in Facebook app

Facebook recognized the importance of faster performance in social media apps back in the day. So they wanted to ensure their app outperformed other apps to maximize their market share. Thus, the team decided to build React Native, a cross-platform framework that would allow the developers to write concise code that facilitates easier iterations.

Having used React Native, the social media giant witnessed significant improvements in their mobile app. The app ran faster, its content loaded quickly and users enjoyed using the app with its near-native UI animations.

The major benefit of React Native in Facebook was the event dashboard startup time. It now begins twice as faster.

It was evident that React Native is a great framework for providing apps with blazing fast performance and near-native experience. So the team also decided to use it to build Facebook Ads Manager app.

2. React Native in the Instagram app

The major objective for the engineering team at Instagram was to increase developer velocity, as it was already a high performing app. They had been experimenting with Live Reload and Hot Reloading when they decided to try React Native for shipping some part of the code faster.

Instagram was already a native app with a slick UI, built for both Android and iOS. So it was much more challenging to integrate a new framework in the app. The team decided to try it out with the simplest feature first - the push notifications view.

Soon, they began to rewrite other parts of the app like Products, Post Promotion, etc. with React Native. The result?

Developers were able to ship features much faster to both Android and iOS apps. At least 90% of the code remained the same for both platforms. This included code for shipping features related to push notifications setting, post promote, and SMS captcha checkpoint.

The developer velocity saw a dramatic increase with faster shipping of features like Lead Gen Ads and Comment Moderation too. After Facebook and Instagram, many others followed the suit and many big companies started using React Native for their apps.

3. React Native in the Bloomberg app

Bloomberg built a new app for both iOS and Android using React Native in 2016. The main aim of the app was to offer personalized content with easy access. The Bloomberg app also consists of video libraries and a live feed to provide an interactive experience to its users.

With React Native, developers at Bloomberg were able to build native-like apps very quickly and easily. The unified development abilities of the framework enabled developers to focus on one feature at a time.

As a result, the development speed increased manifolds while the UI of the apps also remained exceptionally smooth.

Another advantage React Native facilitated was automated code refreshes with no need for code recompiling. So app reload is instant in the Bloomberg app, just like in the Facebook app.

Moreover, the Bloomberg engineering team was also able to use implement A/B testing for various features pretty easily.

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4. React Native in the Walmart app

Until 2016, the Walmart app consisted of a lot of web views embedded on its mobile app. This affected both the performance and user experience of the app. So the supermarket giant finally decided to go for native app development for their mobile app.

React Native was their first choice because their original web app was made using React and Redux. Also, React Native had already gained a lot of popularity as an efficient native development platform by then.

A major advantage that Walmart’s engineering team witnessed was the elimination of any knowledge sharing between teams. This is because one team can focus on one feature at a time while building apps with React Native.

Of course, the developer productivity was a plus too. The framework enabled 95% code sharing between building Android and iOS apps.

Moreover, developers can convert the code to native views before rending it. So the app yielded a feature-rich-UI with smooth animations.

Walmart is one of the top companies using React Native for their apps and it has been very happy with the framework so far.

5. React Native in Wix

Wix.com is a popular company providing website hosting and web design services through its cloud platform. Although the web application was launched in 2006, they decided to build a mobile app later in 2015.

At the time, the engineering team at Wix faced a lot of challenges with respect to scalability. The user-base was expanding rapidly and the developer velocity was decreasing and the development speed was affected due to a lack of clarity in code ownership. Testing was time-consuming too, as most codes were inter-dependent one way or the other.

To resolve all these issues, Wix realized they needed to adopt a multi-module architecture. This new architecture type leveraged React Native in its own way. This led to faster development and increased performance of the Wix app.

6. React Native in the SoundCloud Pulse app

SoundCloud was one of the earliest adopters of React Native. They decided to use it for the SoundCloud Pulse app, just after 5 months of React Native’s release in 2015.

The engineering team was happy with the fact that they didn’t have to let go of all the Objective-C libraries they had built. Native modules in React Native allow you to execute the code of any API into JS as a native code. So you can easily resume the libraries in the new framework that you had been using earlier.

Secondly, because React Native has exceptional ability to work as a native framework, the developers at SoundCloud were able to write their original iOS to React Native in just a couple of days.

Additionally, there was around 90% code reuse between Android and iOS and the overall developer experience had improved too!

7. React Native in the Pinterest app

Pinterest’s engineering team didn’t want to take the leap directly. Instead, they took one full year to study various aspects of React Native. Finally, they built prototypes with React Native to gauge whether it’s practically possible to leverage the cross-platform development framework for Pinterest.

They initially built a small prototype of one section of the app for both platforms. The results were highly satisfactory.

Pinterest developers could finish the initial implementation (of the prototype screen) of React Native in the iOS app in just 10 days. They then pulled the same screen over to the Android app in 2 days. This was possible because they managed to avail of 100% shared UI code between both apps!

The cherry on the cake was the fact that they didn’t have to compromise on the quality of UI on either of the apps.

However, since some screens of the app heavily rely on performance optimization, like the image grids, they decided to continue using native codes for those parts. For the rest of the app, React Native has been incredibly effective in enhancing developer productivity and overall experience.

8.  React Native in the UberEats app

The restaurant dashboard in the UberEats app was built for the web and the development team was comfortable using React. Instead of diving into another new technology altogether, they thought it’d be wiser to go for React Native for building some portions of their mobile app.

UberEats has used React Native in only a few parts of their app but they are very happy with how they could revamp the dashboard.

The dashboard has gained a lot of praise not just from the development team but also from the users. It has become a standard go-to tool for most of the restaurants registered on UberEats.

The Bottom Line

Building a cross-platform app in itself is very advantageous for businesses. You can build apps for both Android and iOS using one code base, the developers can build the app faster and the testing is easy too. But many businesses hesitate to opt for cross-platform app development because they fear they will have to compromise with the UI of the apps.

However, the global companies using React Native I mentioned here and many more prove that you can get both - the efficiency of cross-platform and the near-native experience - if you know how to do it well. Hire an expert React Native Development Company to help you decide whether the framework is right for you.

React Native developers at Third Rock Techkno have rich experiencing in building high-performing cross-platform apps in the shortest possible time frame.