React Native

React Native is a framework for building native mobile applications using React and JavaScript. Unlike hybrid approaches that run web code in a WebView, React Native renders actual native UI components, providing the look, feel, and performance of platform-native applications while allowing significant code sharing between iOS and Android from a single JavaScript codebase.

The framework maps React components to their native equivalents. A View becomes UIView on iOS and android.view on Android. A Text component renders as UILabel or TextView. This means applications automatically respect platform conventions for scrolling, navigation, and interaction patterns. The bridge architecture communicates between JavaScript logic and native rendering, and the New Architecture with Fabric and TurboModules improves this communication with synchronous access to native APIs.

For web development teams, React Native is valuable because developers with React experience can build mobile applications without learning Swift, Kotlin, or entirely new paradigms. Roughly 60-80 percent of code can typically be shared between platforms, with platform-specific code limited to areas where iOS and Android differ significantly. The hot reloading feature enables rapid iteration during development, and Expo provides a managed workflow that handles build configuration, over-the-air updates, and native module management.