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Key Concepts

React vs React Native

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React is rendered through Virtual DOM while React Native uses Native API’s to render components on mobile. React uses HTML and with React Native, you need to familiarize yourself with React Native syntax. React Native doesn’t use CSS either.

Learning React vs React Native

https://www.quora.com/What-are-five-differences-between-React-js-and-React-Native

I think a better way to phrase this would be: “What is the difference between building web applications and mobile applications using React?”

Why do I say that? Because React Native is a consequence of React (the library). You are still writing React code, but the framework you are using (React Native) offers additional functionality to run your app on iOS or Android. If you know React, you already know most of React Native.

I am not an expert on either, but I will try to point out some core differences between writing code for web and mobile using React:

1. There is no HTML or CSS in React Native. You can’t use tags such as ‘div’ and ‘p’ to organize your content. You can’t include .css files.
   However, React Native provides alternate ways to do the same things. Components replace tags and you have to write your styles in JavaScript files. For example, ‘text’ replaces ‘p’ and ‘background-color’ becomes ‘backgroundColor’ to follow camel case convention we use in JavaScript.
2. Since there is no CSS, you can bid farewell to CSS animations. You can use React Native’s Animated API for animations.
3. Since you aren’t building on the web, there is no web inspector.
   You can’t test something in your browser before making changes to your code because there is no browser. You have to make changes to your code directly and React Native reloads the application for you.
4. Since you can’t test your app in the browser, you will need to have a emulator running. If you are building for both Android and iOS, you need Android Studio and XCode.
5. Instead of routing to different web pages, you are navigating between different scenes of your application when you use React Native. You will have to use Navigator (or NavigatorIOS for iOS) component provided by React Native for that.

And then there is all the typical stuff involved in getting your app published on respective stores that you don’t have to deal with while building for the web.

To sum it up, if you have been working with React for some time, say 6–8 months, you will have no trouble in picking up React Native. If you haven’t, I suggest you first try out React by building one or two medium sized apps.

These two are not fundamentally different, so your experience in writing a web application will count. Once you have mastered both, you can create apps which not only look nice in the browser, but behave just like native apps on mobiles with a little work.

Potential Value Opportunities

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