Introducing React Native

In January at React.js Conf, we announced React Native, a new framework for building native apps using React. We’re happy to announce that we’re open-sourcing React Native and you can start building your apps with it today.

For more details, see Tom Occhino’s post on the Facebook Engineering blog:

What we really want is the user experience of the native mobile platforms, combined with the developer experience we have when building with React on the web.

With a bit of work, we can make it so the exact same React that’s on GitHub can power truly native mobile applications. The only difference in the mobile environment is that instead of running React in the browser and rendering to divs and spans, we run it an embedded instance of JavaScriptCore inside our apps and render to higher-level platform-specific components.

It’s worth noting that we’re not chasing “write once, run anywhere.” Different platforms have different looks, feels, and capabilities, and as such, we should still be developing discrete apps for each platform, but the same set of engineers should be able to build applications for whatever platform they choose, without needing to learn a fundamentally different set of technologies for each. We call this approach “learn once, write anywhere.”

To learn more, visit the React Native website.