React Native Development

Cornerstone Digital has been designing and developing websites for both the Calgary market and beyond, since 2005. Over the years, we’ve built hundreds of websites, dozens of web apps, and dozens of online stores, empowering companies to use the internet effectively to further their business goals. Building from scratch, upgrading your current site, or need to integrate with other solutions? No challenge is too big or small!

Why and When to use React Native

React Native is a framework for building native apps for iOS and Android. It uses Javascript via React to speed development and handle all of the display and styling layers, while hooking in to the native app layer for the heavy lifting. React is very quick to build and prototype, and when compiled into the app is responsible for all user interactions and experience. Processing and core functionality, such as camera, location services, and notification support are all handled by the device, which makes it much faster and more stable than non-native solutions.

React JS by itself is a great framework for developing web applications that are intended for browser environments, while native app development is the typical method for building powerful and stable mobile apps. Combined, React Native allows us to leverage both frameworks at the same time to build cost effective mobile apps with all of the features of native apps. Development times are greatly reduced, as we can prototype and build quickly via React and deploy simultaneously on both iOS and Android, versus native where apps for each device environment would need to be developed separately.

A popular method of development is to prototype a Progressive Web App (PWA) in React JS, which allows us to prove concepts and test functionality, then migrate the React JS code to React Native for deployment in the app stores. This pathway saves time and costs much less than native development.

React Native supports a wide range of functional testing via jest and enzyme to provide real-time coverage of user paths and test cases.

Strengths

  • Speed of development
  • Rapid prototyping
  • Stable and secure
  • Able to handle high load processing tasks

Weaknesses

  • Not all core device functionality is fully supported with React Native components, so bridge modules are sometimes required to interact with native functionality. Native module bridges can be slower than native functionality in some cases.

Read more about our other Mobile App Development services.

Recent Work