It all started with Facebook introducing a new JavaScript library into their newsfeed in 2011 and later in Instagram in 2012. Simply put, it is a JavaScript library that allows building User interfaces. It allows developers to create large web applications that use data which can change over time, without reloading the page. It does so in a fast & reliable way.
When it comes to react-native, major apps like Facebook, Instagram, Netflix and many others are striving to constantly improve the user experience and are implementing and adapting to new frameworks and trends. With a JavaScript runtime, this lightweight, fast and modern way to execute code on your computer has proved to be an irreplaceable tool for building fast, simple and scalable iOS and Android user interface apps.
OK, this one is obvious. Facebook was the place where the React library was initially created. Having content that needs to load quickly in your newsfeed, they needed an app that runs faster, leaving enough time for the users to interact with it.
The mobile app is built with React Native, a library version similar to React, or better say a cousin, that allows displaying the iOS and Android native components instead of the DOM elements.
Facebook has now launched a completely rewritten version of React, called React Fiber.
Instagram is completely based on React. It allowed them to add numerous features, such as tags that pop up without hashtags, search engine accuracy, geo locations, Google Maps APIs and many more.
Instagram has built a product infrastructure that started being used by product teams in parallel, such as navigation, translations, core components, etc.
As a result, they ended up with a code that is 85-99% shared between Android and iOS apps, as React Native allowed product teams to ship features faster on both platforms, whilst improving developer velocity.
Netflix
With the main goal of reducing the initial load time needed to browse and watch individualized content, Netflix was looking for a seamless and dynamic way to deliver and render the user interface past login, especially on the mobile applications, which are dependent on the network conditions.
Netflix used React on their platform called Gibbon, which is used in low-performance TV devices instead of the DOM, a platform used in web browsers.
Netflix implemented React to increase the startup speed, runtime performance and overall scalability by introducing isomorphic JavaScript, virtual DOM rendering and support for compositional design patterns.
Airbnb
As a big fan of React, Airbnb started working on an React-Sketchapp, an open-source library that allows you to write React components that render to Sketch documents.
Painting with code, as they describe it, allows Sketch renderings to be updated instantly by applying only slight modifications to the code, resulting in lessening the bottleneck between the developers and the designers. It allows seamless integration of one’s data, including traditional APIs and GraphQL endpoints, having rich layout with flexbox and automatic internationalization as the library renders variations of text in different languages, with the same design, using the Google Translate API, all done by generating Sketch files from code whist keeping DLS in sync.
Yahoo! Mail
They've come a long way since the launching in 1999. Starting with completely server rendered Web 1.0 app to one of the largest YUI based rich internet web application.
With the code starting to be harder to debug they needed a new platform that would have a predictable flow that was easier to debug, independently deployable components, shorter learning curve and no dependency on large platform libraries.
Yahoo decided to use React and Flux because of the following reasons:
- React implements one-way reactive data flow
- Virtual DOM allows client and server side rendering
- Code in Javascript
- Growing and active community
The list of companies and apps using React is growing by the day. Here is an overview of some of them.
In conclusion
There are numerous organizational benefits and improved efficiencies that proved to be reasons enough for the big names to implement React into their products. Even though this upgrade requires time and cost resources, it is absolutely worth it. The amazing benefits offered by this framework will be shown in creating impeccable user experience, both on the web and mobile applications.
If you are starting a new project, there is absolutely no reason to skip React. Of course we are here to help you in the implementation.