React Native has been a hot topic among developers since its launch by Meta in 2015.
Want to know the reason?
It’s pretty simple—“Ultimate UX.” Yes, it offers UX that you, as a developer or entrepreneur, have never experienced. But your users can! HOW?
I’ll tell you all about it and something more about React Native, which can help you achieve the ultimate UX with low cost and effort.
Let's begin by understanding why it’s such a magnet attracting app developers worldwide. This framework allowed developers to build apps using a single code across platforms. This saved time and money by reducing the need to create separate codes for each platform.
You might be skeptical about the quality of the apps in such cases.
What if I tell you there is a way to ensure quality, optimize cost, and provide enhanced UX? Does that seem far from the truth?
Well, not really!
I recently came across React Native Libraries, which are easy to set up, take less time, and save money. Want to know which one of them is best for you? Here is a list!
Top 7 React Native Libraries For Ultimate UX!
Here are the top Libraries that will help you build a React Native App with a great user experience:
1. React Native Elements
React Native Elements is a UI component library for building apps with better navigation and screen space. It has over 24,700 stars on GitHub.
- Navigation components: Gets components like badges and avatars, headers and tabs, and features for handling user interactions like checkboxes and switches.
- Screen space: This feature provides tools for creating dialogues and bottom sheets, allowing for additional content without taking up too much screen space.
- Community and updates: Its active and regular community ensures the app stays updated with the latest design trends and best practices.
2. React Native Paper
React Native Paper gets over 10,000 stars on GitHub. It focuses on providing a consistent look for your app across all platforms (iOS and Android). The best part, it follows Google's Material Design guidelines.
Now, for those unfamiliar with material design let me explain in brief.
Material design refers to print design methods that include typography, grids, space, scale, color, and imagery. It helps to create a hierarchy, meaning, and focus that gives users an immersive experience.
- Material design style: Employs Material design styles and themes, ensuring that apps developed using React Native Paper have a clean and professional appearance.
Dark Mode: Supports dark mode, which can significantly enhance the user experience, especially in low-light environments.
- Customization: Customizable style of components to match the specific needs of the brand identity while maintaining consistency.
API Integration: Technically, React Native Paper leverages native platform APIs for optimal performance and a natural feel.
3. React Native Vector Icons
React Native Vector Icons specializes in icons and boasts over 3,000 appealing and scalable icons that can be used in your React Native app. It has over 15,000 starts on GitHub.
- Icons Collection: The library bundles a massive collection of icons from popular icon sets, such as FontAwesome, Entypo, ion icons, Material Icons, and more.
- Crisp rendering: These scalable icons extend, style, and integrate seamlessly into your project, ensuring crisp rendering across all screen resolutions without quality loss.
- Flexibility: These icons are versatile, functioning as emojis alongside text, button components, or native image elements.
- SVG Support: It supports SVG via Fontello or regular icon fonts, making it easy to customize the appearance of the icons.
- Time saver: The library is handy for saving time by not having to create custom icons from scratch.
4. React Native Navigation
React Native Navigation is a library that allows the creation of complex navigation flows easily and provides features like:
- Stack navigation (used for hierarchical navigation),
- Drawer navigation (for side-menu navigation),
- Tab navigators (for bottom tab navigation) and
- Modal navigators (for overlays).
Other crucial features are,
- Animation and Transitions: Offers customizable navigation features like animations and transitions, and it uses an API to manage them and the user journey as well.
- Supports Deep Linking: Allows users to navigate specific parts of your app directly through external links.
5. React Native Gesture Handler
Users are increasingly looking for gesture-based interaction in mobile apps, and this library is specially designed for it. React Native Gesture Handler lets developers create responsive gesture-based interactions in their React Native apps.
- Declarative API: Offers a declarative API that builds a responsive and better touch-based experience.
- Built-in Handler: Provides built-in gesture handlers that can understand users' common gestures, such as taps, swipes, rotation, long presses, and pan gestures.
It aims to replace React Native's built-in Gesture Responder System, which has performance limitations as it runs on the JavaScript thread. So, every time a gesture event is carried out, the app has to go through several phases to determine the user's intention. This can lead to a more extended response of a touch.
React Native Gesture Handler can eliminate that and give a seamless experience.
6. React Native UI Kitten
It is a free and open-source library based on the Eva Design systems, which give the app a clean visual experience.
- Domain Variation: This can be a starter kit for building mobile applications in various domains such as e-commerce, social media, fitness, and more.
- Dark and Light theme: UI Kitten creates appealing UIs with 20+ customizable components with light and dark themes, saving you time on design details.
- No reloading: Allows runtime themes to instantly switch between different visual styles without reloading the application or modifying its source code.
Easy to use: Once you install the UI Kitten package, you can import and use the components in your project.
7. React Native Gifted Chat
Accessible communication is an essential aspect of user experience. Users should be allowed to communicate efficiently within the app. React Native Gifted Chat is one such library that provides chat functionality in the app.
- Built-in Components: Offers inbuilt components like bubbles, avatar views, input text fields, text messaging, emojis, and more.
- Personalization: Comes with available option of further customizing them to match the brand identity and the overall look and feel of the app.
- Multimedia Support: This library supports multimedia content like Images, videos, and audio messaging that can be integrated into the chat interface.
- Customization: Users can customize their chat interface by changing the color, font, and avatar style.
Conclusion
These libraries offer various customization options, themes, and components that can give React native apps a clean and appealing user interface. Using these libraries, developers can create a one-of-a-kind experience for users, boosting retention and conversions.
It also reduces development time and costs but needs effective deployment. This is where a seasoned React native developer can help. The best way is to hire React native developers and leverage these libraries for optimal performance at low cost and time.
