10 Apps That Use React Native
You are probably using apps built with React Native everyday
In this article, I want to show you 10 popular apps that currently use React Native! Many well-known companies are making big bets on this framework.
They are developing complex apps that are used by millions of people every day. Still, despite having sufficient resources, they have chosen React Native over native app development.
This should give you enough evidence that React Native is not going to be discontinued any time soon and that you can use the framework for your next project.
It should be no big surprise that Facebook heavily uses React Native in their own apps given that they are the major force behind React and React Native.
According to Facebook engineer Dan Abramov, Facebook’s main app contains over 750 screens written in React Native and several standalone apps of the company are using the framework.
Some parts of the app have been completely rewritten in React Native to significantly improve performance. In this article, Facebook explains the technical details of how they reduced the rendering time of the “Events” screen by half after migrating to React Native
Facebook’s Instagram team is also heavily using React Native. The team is migrating many of their WebViews to React Native screens. They used WebView’s in the past because they did a great job with code sharing and fast iteration speeds. Unfortunately, WebViews are quite slow, don’t offer a real native experience and require a stable internet connection.
React Native is now used in many screens of the app like “Saved”, “Push Notifications”, “Post Promotion” and “Comment moderation”. These screens now load significantly faster than the WebViews and feel more native while still benefiting from code-sharing and fast iteration speeds.
Discord
The team at Discord made a very interesting decision. They agreed that only their iOS team will switch to React Native since the Android team was quite happy with their current process. Obviously, the cross-platform aspect of React Native was not their main motivation to migrate.
In this very detailed article the Discord team shares how they solved some of their significant performance problems on older devices. I highly recommend reading through it if you are also encountering performance issues with the framework or you are just curious to learn Discord’s story.
Shopify
The engineers of Shopify recently moved from developing native apps to a mix of native and React Native apps. In 2019 they started testing React Native by rewriting their app “Shop” (formerly called “Arrive”).
In rewriting the Arrive app in React Native, the team felt that they were twice as productive than using native development — even just on one mobile platform
The rewrite resulted in
- less crashes on iOS than on the native iOS app
- an Android version launched
- a team composed of mobile + non-mobile developers.
Since then Shopify has been using React Native in multiple apps across many teams. Each of their teams decides individually whether or not to migrate, some apps do not use React Native or use it for one of the platforms only.
Skype
In early 2017 Microsoft started rolling out a new update for their Skype Android app, with the iOS app following a bit later. With those changes, they completely rewrote their code-base to React Native.
You might be a bit surprised that Microsoft which maintains a framework that’s quite similar to React Native, namely Xamarin, still decided to go with React Native for their popular product Skype.
However Microsoft is contributing a lot to the React Native ecosystem, most noticeably they maintain react-native-windows which makes it possible to write React Native apps for Windows and macOS!
Coinbase
The team at Coinbase recently rewrote their Android app to React Native. While in the beginning there was almost no noticeable performance difference between the current native app and the new React Native app, they started to see a decrease in performance as they added more and more features with the new framework.
Still, they decided to go with React Native and dug deeper to figure out what’s causing their performance issues with great success! They managed to improve their total rendering time by over 90% after implementing everything they shared in this great article.
Tesla
In 2017 the well-known electric car manufacturer Tesla published a brand new app that is using React Native under-the-hood. If you take a look at their open job positions, you will see that the team is still hiring more React Native engineers for their teams.
Just recently Tesla took over the ownership and maintenance of the package react-native-camera-kit, which further proves their commitment to the framework.
Walmart
In the past, the team at Walmart similarly to Facebook relied heavily on WebViews. Both of them struggled with the same problems:
- Performance
- No native feel
- Requires internet connection
Looking for options on how to improve the user experience they had to decide between a real native or React Native implementation. Walmart decided to go with React Native for several reasons:
- Improved productivity
- Code-sharing
- Time-to-market
After doing a lot of performance testing, the team says that the results are very promising and that they don’t see any reason why they should switch to a native implementation.
We strongly believe that React Native is a fantastic framework. It’s done everything we wanted of it, and it’s done so admirably.
If you are interested in more details, they shared a lot more about their experience with the framework in their blog post.
UberEATS
The engineers at UberEATS struggled with a few quirks in their legacy implementation which was fully web-based. For example, permission for playing sound notifications (quite essential in a loud buzzing restaurant) always required a user interaction first, or printing physical receipts from web-browsers was only possible with AirPrint compatible printers.
Searching for solutions, the team evaluated React Native for their Restaurant Dashboard and decided to build a small MVP using the framework. The MVP turned out great and the engineers continued with a gradual migration of their Dashboard to React Native. The team didn’t regret their decision and shared much more details on how they use React Native in their blog post.
2048
There are even games written in React Native like the game “2048” by Ketchapp! The game quickly became one of the most popular games on the App Store and Play Market, downloaded millions of times!
React Native is getting better with each update and more companies are starting to build incredible things with this framework. These teams significantly reduce the costs of developing their apps and increase the speed at which they can deliver new features.
I hope this gives you enough confidence to choose React Native for your next project! If you liked this article make sure to follow me on Twitter and Medium for more content.
