We build our Mobile Applications with React Native. React Native is the most powerful cross-platform mobile application building framework with which you can build applications for both iOS and Android at the same time, with the same design and sharing almost 90% of the code. The difference is that it won’t create a hybrid or mobile web app - it uses some UI components which is identified as different. It uses the UI blocks as iOS or Android. React Native binds Javascript and React to get these UI blocks.
React Native library was announced at Facebook in 2015. Since then, a lot of mobile applications shifted base from being native mobile applications to React Native. In 2014, Facebook F8 applications were built using native code before they rewrote their iOS build to React Native in 2015. And now social network giants like Instagram, Airbnb and some parts of Facebook run on React Native.
Most mobile apps which uses Javascript will have bulk of HTML and Javascript inside a webview.
Though we use Javascript for React Native we end up rendering native components - this is nearly native.
For backend, we use Firebase and Rails Backend. Firebase is a powerful platform for backend where it has databases in real-time with security rules. It has Authentication Services, Storage Services (where it provides secure upload and downloads), Firebase Cloud Messaging where you can trigger notifications for a user and it has Cloud Functions where you can add a few logics and remove the weight of code in the mobile app. Many famous applications like Sky Scanner, Pic Collage have successfully implemented this for their mobile applications - this is actually one place for everything. Rails Backend is super fast in both performance & development, and it is constantly improving technology.
