I love mobile apps. I donāt know what itās been about them, but for the past 10 years, Iāve been fascinated by them. Probably something to do with spending countless hours on a GameBoy playing Pokemon when I was little. Good timesā¦
If youāre getting started in the mobile space or youāre an industry veteran looking for a new way to make mobile apps, let me show you how Iām currently making my apps, in as little as two weeks, for my clients and my full time job.
Ā
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. Thereās not a day that goes by where I donāt 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 canāt stay in the native layer. Thereās too many resources spent on multi-platform teams and long compilation times.
Mobile app development canāt stay in the native layer. Thereās 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, thereās a second key advantage to the framework Iād like to point out: the support by the community.
There hasnāt been a problem I couldnāt 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 havenāt stumbled on it.
Learn how to get started with React Native here
Ā
My weapon of choice to program is Visual Studio Code. āLightweight and customizableā¦ā is the reason I keep coming back to the IDE. I like the code editor so much I wrote aĀ medium post about my favorite plugins and extensions here.
While most react native projects should work simply off ofĀ yarn ios
Ā orĀ yarn android
Ā itās 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.
Ā
This is the code I usually run with when developing apps. Itās one of thoseĀ if it ain't broke, don't fix itĀ
sort of deals. Iāve been thinking about grouping my code byĀ modules
Ā instead ofĀ types
Ā but I havenāt started a new project in a minute. The day I do, Iāll probably try it out, see if it works š¤
Ā
Here are the libraries I use every time I start a project
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 myĀ GitHub, if youāre looking for an easy way to get started with a react native project
Ā
How are you building mobile apps? Please let me know in the comments what youāre using to make mobile apps and how itās working out for ya.
Remember one applause a day, keeps the bugs awayā¦