![]() ![]() It took me longer to get this than I dare to admit, but the way React Native apps can run natively on your smart phone is not by running Javascript, and not by compiling your Javascript to native code, but by making requests to APIs that render native components in Objective-C on iPhone and in Java on Android. So how could React Native apps be called actual native apps? Short answer: APIs. What now? Had iOS and Android somehow stealthily been sneaking in support for writing native apps in Javascript? Because last I checked, iOS apps had to be built with Objective-C or Swift, and Android apps with Java or Kotlin. How it allowed building cross-platform mobile apps using Javascript - that weren’t hybrid! But at the time, I’d been hearing about React Native for quite some time. Gmail, Slack, Atom and Figma to name a few. Now, I don’t hold any grudge against hybrid frameworks. Instead, they promoted their “own” internal mobile app platform - seemingly just some thin layer around Cordova - to justify a lock-in giving them exclusive app maintenance rights and making an eventual future handover complicated and expensive. Although Cordova is completely free and open-source, one of them had even tried to hide the fact that this was the technology they used. And they all shared one thing: that they wanted to build the app with the hybrid framework Cordova.Īnd that wasn’t all. And a third didn’t even seem to have done any pitch prep work whatsoever. Another agency proposed a ridiculous price with some even more ridiculous recurring fees. One of them had sent some design sketches that were really sloppy and not at all in line with the brand presented on the client’s website. And I was just amazed by the low quality of the propositions. Before I was even considering building the app on my own, I was asked to review them as a friendly favor. When I joined the project, my client had already received a few offers from some local digital agencies. So what was it that made this particular project that exciting? Even more exciting than working on a hyper-growth product used by thousands of companies in a team with some of the most awesome people I’ve met? In three words: freedom, challenge and self-development. I just happened to find another project that I felt even more passionately about. In fact, I was very happy with my former job and employer. Of course, career strategy and work life happiness aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. In other words: my resume is already a trainwreck that could probably not get more scattered and incoherent. But, being the hopeless generalist that I am, I committed several years ago to making career decisions not based on career strategy, but rather on what makes me happy. Now, you might be asking yourself - why would one even attempt to get into the mobile app space after just shy of a year of professional web development experience? Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep specializing in that area while adding some years of experience to your resume?Ībsolutely it would. Although it wasn’t my original intention, this advisory role eventually resulted in me taking on the development of the app as lead developer. ![]() Somewhat intellectually starved I said yes. Although he knew my job kept me busy and didn’t expect a full-time commitment, he asked if I wanted to be a part of the project in a more advisory type of role. It was in this gloomy mood that my dad reached out to me about his intentions to build a mobile app for his company’s customers. During one week, when the product team’s rotating tech support duty was mine, I was feeling a bit bored and frustrated with some of the bugs I was assigned to. Summer was approaching rapidly, and the otherwise fairly high work pace was getting slower by the day. It was my first dev job, and I’d landed it barely a year earlier (which you can read more about in this article). At the time, I was working as a full stack web developer for a Stockholm-based startup. Last May, I stumbled upon this exciting freelance opportunity. Here’s the bumpy ride, all the way from react-native init to app store release. As it happens, it was also the first app I’ve built for a client as a freelancing developer. By Charlie Jeppsson How I built my first React Native app for my first freelance client recently launched my first native mobile app built with React Native. ![]()
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