Why React Native Matters

30 Jan 2015

A couple days ago Facebook announced React Native, a version of React that outputs native views instead of a DOM.

This is fantastic news for us native developers. But before we get to why, let’s dispell a couple concerns.

React Native isn’t just another Titanium or PhoneGap.

React Native is not a write-once-run-everywhere solution. The phrase Facebook has used so far is “learn-once-write-everywhere.” They’re interested in sharing the paradigm of React across platforms, not the code necessarily.

JavaScript is an implementation detail.

Don’t get distracted by the use of JavaScript. JavaScript is just a language. There are plenty of other, better languages that can be compiled to JavaScript.

The important thing about React Native is the idea behind it.

React lets us write our UIs as a pure function of their state.

This is a big, important idea.

Right now we write UIs by poking at them, manually mutating their properties when something changes, adding and removing views, etc. This is fragile and error-prone. Some tools exist to lessen the pain, but they can only go so far. UIs are big, messy, mutable, stateful bags of sadness.

React let us describe our entire UI for a given state, and then it does the hard work of figuring out what needs to change. It abstracts all the fragile, error-prone code out away from us. We describe what we want, React figures out how to accomplish it.

UIs become composable, immutable, stateless value types. React Native is fantastic news.