The entire world is sliding towards technology and online applications. Everything around us is becoming tech-centric day by day. This has increased the demand for React Native Development, developers, and app development companies, and on top of all the emergence of coherent applications. The tech revolution is benefitting people hugely and at the same time the expectations, desired aspects, and convenience levels expected are rapidly enlarging.
To overcome the demands and needs, new tools and frameworks are released on a daily basis. This has made business owners get confused about what to choose and which framework suits their needs better. Considering web app development, there is no better choice than theReact Native framework. React Native is a flexible and open-source framework introduced by Facebook. It supports the development of simple, responsive, and scalable frontends of web applications.
Many industry giants including Netflix, Paypal, and Apple are adopting React Native in their software product development because of its rapid development support and other beneficial parameters. With efficient updates and rendering components, React allows developers to develop highly interactive and efficient web apps.
Why Choose React Native?
- SEO-friendly
- Rapid rendering
- Offers code stability
- Easy to learn and adopt
- Useful development tools
- Large community of developers
- Increased developer productivity
- Allows creating custom components
- Helps in building rich user interfaces
- Adopted by leading brands for frontend development
Given all these, to develop a perfectly functioning application for your business using React Native, it is essential to possess knowledge on what are the React Native best practices one must follow. Let us get to the groundbreaking!
7 Best Practices Every React Native Development Company Must Embrace
#1 File Organization
To understand the flow of the project, it is necessary to maintain the files and folders in an organized manner. Stepping into React development without considering the pre-planning and other file organization procedures leads to unnecessary anomalies. To avoid them, follow these steps below,
- Create an asset folder and put your CSS files, image files, and font files in them.
- Follow the same file hierarchy to place small components in subfolders.
- Generally, developers use index.js as the entry folder. This might become quite challenging with navigation and while proceeding with the app development. So, it is better to add the created folder as the entry point.
- Add .json files for each component’s folder so that it would be easy to handle the files.
#2 Write Small Components
Follow the component reusability principle of React Native, i.e, break down the components into smaller components. This way components become easy to read, modify, debug, maintain, and reuse. Try to refactor the code as much as possible and split the existing components into many smaller components.
Make sure one component is responsible for one functionality because it makes React function more efficiently. This will also make your component reusability and component breakdown processes easy by following this( single responsibility) principle.
#3 Use Functional Components
React developers usually get confused with whether to start with a class component or a functional component. In circumstances where you are not using any component states or lifecycle methods, it is better to go for functional components. They are easier to test and read with no life cycles or states inculcated in them. They are formed with a few lines of code with plain Javascript.
Extracting small components becomes an easy task with the functional components usage. It requires no binding functions(this) to do the same. Functional components are simple to use, understand and test.
#4 Avoid Using Index as Key Props
Most of the React Native developers tend to use the value of the index as key props. This is a bad practice. The addition of key props is required only when an array of JSX elements is created. This might result in processing the wrong details in the wrong place since accessing an array using key props is also not a good practice.
The actual use of key props is for rendering. It determines what should be rendered and what shouldn’t be rendered. React doesn’t load the whole elements again and again. It identifies ones with the same keys and eliminates its rendering. Hence, key props must not be used in unnecessary places.
#5 Don’t Use Props in Init State
Using props in the initial(Init) state is also one of the bad practices. Because the constructor gets loaded only at the time of component creation. When any other modifications are done post-component creation, it wouldn’t get updated since the props will remain in the same old state.
In order to update components while changing props, the lifecycle method “componentDidUpdate ” can be made use of. This method won’t trigger in the initial state. So, the props must be updated in the initial state and the value updation can happen using this method each time the component loads.
#6 Initialize State Without Class Constructor
Initializing the component state in the class constructor might result in redundancy of line of code which in turn leads to serious performance issues of the React Native application. If at all you need to initialize, don’t forget to call super with props. However, this also has chances of creating issues.
Using class fields to initialize state is the best option to avoid all these problems. This will reduce the code lines’ redundancy and decrease the noise in your code.
#7 Reduce Stateful Components Usage
Instead of using stateful components which take a lot of memory space, stateless components which require no memory space can be made use of. It requires less coding and offers increased app performance.
The ReactHooks feature allows writing efficient stateful functional components. This serves helpful as the project cycle grows. So, now with the release of the version having ReactHooks, developers are not just bound to use stateful components since they need to use state.
Wrap Up
Now you would have got an idea of which React Native best practices seemed really helpful for upscaling your React NAtive app development and lowering the time-to-market. To build one for your business, you need to partner with a renowned React Native development company following these practices and agile development methodologies. And Pyramidion Solutions could be your sure-shot success solution! All you have to do is connect with our expert team, share your requirements, get an estimated timeline and quote, and there you go, you are ready to start your React Native app development. Get in touch with us right away!
