React Native

React Native is an open-source framework for building native mobile applications using JavaScript and React, created by Facebook (Meta) and first released in 2015. React Native renders using actual native UI components (UIView on iOS, Android View on Android) rather than a web view, delivering genuine native performance and platform-appropriate look and feel. Developers write shared JavaScript/TypeScript business logic and React components; the framework bridges these to native platform APIs. React Native's New Architecture (Fabric renderer + JSI bridge, stable in 2024) eliminates the asynchronous JavaScript bridge that caused performance issues in the original architecture, delivering synchronous native calls. Expo — a framework on top of React Native — simplifies the development experience significantly, providing managed workflows, over-the-air updates (EAS Update), and a library of pre-built native modules. React Native is used by Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft, Shopify, and thousands of apps in production. The framework's main advantage over Flutter: JavaScript ecosystem access, React knowledge transfer from web teams, and native component rendering that automatically follows platform design guidelines. Weaknesses versus Flutter: the JS bridge (improving with New Architecture), platform-specific code for complex native features, and more configuration overhead than Flutter's unified rendering model. Expo has largely addressed the configuration complexity for most apps.