How to make mobile apps in 2022 📱

I love mobile apps. I don’t know what it’s been about them, but for the past 10 years, I’ve been fascinated by them. Probably something to do with spending countless hours on a GameBoy playing Pokemon when I was little. Good times…

If you’re getting started in the mobile space or you’re an industry veteran looking for a new way to make mobile apps, let me show you how I’m currently making my apps, in as little as two weeks, for my clients and my full time job.

React Native 🔬

To kick things off, as someone who used to wait hours, for a fortune 500 mobile app to load on android (Kotlin), I love React Native. My love for it goes a lot further than how quick it is to see my changes on the screen.

To start things off, job availability for react native is insane. There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t get an invitation to interview or talk about my work. The places I work for struggle to find good candidates, only assuring me of what I suspected when I started looking into cross-platform development.

Mobile app development can’t stay in the native layer. There’s too many resources spent on multi-platform teams and long compilation times.

Mobile app development can’t stay in the native layer. There’s too many resources spent on multi-platform teams and long compilation times. Specifically, in the start-up scene, thin run-ways will prefer cross-platform development to traditional native approaches.

In addition to speed and a cost-reduction to teams that adopt react native, there’s a second key advantage to the framework I’d like to point out: the support by the community.

There hasn’t been a problem I couldn’t solve by simply searching top-tier libraries on NPM. The community has made almost everything you could think of, probably because of how long react has been around, but still, in the mobile realm, if there is a better library of plugins, extensions and components, I haven’t stumbled on it.

Learn how to get started with React Native here

Code Editor 🖥️

My weapon of choice to program is Visual Studio Code. “Lightweight and customizable…” is the reason I keep coming back to the IDE. I like the code editor so much I wrote a medium post about my favorite plugins and extensions here.

While most react native projects should work simply off of yarn ios or yarn android it’s also good to learn how to navigate xCode and Android studio. In the long run this will help you understand how to build and release apps away from the react native console, which is a useful skill when inheriting projects or joining a team.

Install VS Code now

Code Structure 📁

This is the code I usually run with when developing apps. It’s one of those if it ain't broke, don't fix it sort of deals. I’ve been thinking about grouping my code by modules instead of types but I haven’t started a new project in a minute. The day I do, I’ll probably try it out, see if it works 🤞

Recommended libraries 📱

Here are the libraries I use every time I start a project

• React-navigation
• Lottie
• Tailwindcss-React-native
• Axios
• Redux
• React-native-vector-icons
• Firebase-react-native

I use these libraries so much that I built a template that I use for every react native project I build. You can find that template on my GitHub, if you’re looking for an easy way to get started with a react native project

Closing thoughts

How are you building mobile apps? Please let me know in the comments what you’re using to make mobile apps and how it’s working out for ya.

Remember one applause a day, keeps the bugs away…

Visit my UpWork and Follow me on GitHub for more