(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/Jacob Ammentorp Lund)
React started as a JavaScript library to help Facebook’s developers to build single-page apps. Requiring a framework which enabled Facebook’s employees to use their existing React skills to build for iOS and Android – Facebook created React Native – a framework which allows developers to build native apps using React.
In March last year, Facebook decided to allow the rest of the world to use and help develop React Native by providing it on an open source license. Since Facebook made this move, the company reports it has been used by more than 500 companies and developers who publish apps on iOS, and more than 200 companies and developers who publish on Android.
Microsoft is helping the React Native community build and deploy apps faster than ever.
A couple of industry giants have now put their weight behind React Native and offered-up support for their own platforms. Microsoft has announced it will support the framework on Windows 10, whilst Samsung has pledged to enable developers who use the framework to create apps for Tizen.
Microsoft’s support is a clear win for React Native developers – allowing their apps to be deployed on the more than 270 million active Windows 10 devices. In a blog post, Microsoft wrote: “In addition to this work on the core framework support, Microsoft is also providing open source tools and services to help developers create React Native apps.”
“The React Native extension for Visual Studio Code brings an intuitive, productive environment to author and debug React Native apps. Coupled with CodePush, an open source service that can push updates directly to users, Microsoft is helping the React Native community build and deploy apps faster than ever.”
Tizen is a relatively small platform based on HTML5, but is often used for Samsung’s Smart TVs and smartwatches which opens-up new opportunities for React Native developers.
Facebook itself announced new tools for React Native during their F8 developer conference this week, including the launch of an SDK to help with implementing the social network’s basic features such as App Analytics, Sharing, and the improved Facebook Graph API.
The support of Microsoft and Samsung offer a good indication about the health of React Native, but nothing is more clear than hard numbers. There are now over 250,000 React Native developers, according to Facebook, and more than 600 people have committed their own code to its codebase since it was made open source. That’s pretty impressive.
Do you welcome the React Native support by Microsoft and Samsung? Let us know in the comments.
