Significant React Native Libraries for Mobile App Development in 2021

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React Native happens to be one of the most sought-after app development frameworks across the globe as it comes with a host of advantages like a cost-effective developmental cycle, faster time-to-market, high performance, modular and intuitive architecture, and many more.

One of the unique benefits of this framework is the availability of countless third-party libraries that expedite the development and prove highly convenient for every React Native App Development Company. However, owing to the presence of thousands of React Native libraries, selecting the apt ones becomes a herculean task. As a consequence, development teams often have to spare a great deal of time and effort for picking the right tool or library that would prove fruitful.

For easing out this task, I have penned down the most significant tools and libraries that complement the React Native framework. A quick read will help you to find the perfect match that suits your requirement.

Tools and Libraries for Various React Native App Development Categories

Category: User Interface

React Native Elements

• This UI library, built using JavaScript, has earned 20.5k stars and 4.2k forks on GitHub.
• This library comes with cross-platform compatibility and supports Expo.
• It is easy to use, customizable, and community-driven.

Lottie-react-native

• This library created by Airbnb enables adding attractive animations to React Native applications.
• React Native developers can either select from the free animations available or design and add their animations employing “Adobe After Effects.”
• Functioning: The animation data is exported in JSON format with Bodymovin and rendered natively on mobile.

Styled Components

• This library enables developers to write CSS code for styling components
• It removes the mapping between styles and components, thereby easing out the usage of components as a low-level styling construct.
• The styles can be reused several times resulting in lesser coding

React Native Vector icons

• React Native Vector icons is a library that offers numerous icons of various types, designed for the React Native Apps.
• Each element can be fully customized

Category: Forms

Formik

• It’s a small library that helps to build forms in React
• Formik enables to validate the form values, display error messages and helps to submit the form.

Redux-form

• Redux-form enables proper state management in Redux
• It helps in tracking the commonest form states like fields contained in the form, focussed field, field values, fields which the users have interacted with, etc.

Category: Testing

Jest

This is a popular testing framework, designed and maintained by Facebook, and is used for testing JavaScript code. This versatile testing tool is compatible with any JavaScript framework or library, including React, Angular, VueJS, etc. Uber, Airbnb, and Intuit are some of the top brands that have leveraged this tool. Its offerings are:

• High-speed performance
• Standard syntax with report guide
• Mocks functions, with the inclusion of third-party node_module libraries
• Conducts parallelization, snapshot, and async method tests
• Enables managing tests with bigger objects, by using live snapshots

Mocha

Mocha is a JavaScript test framework, used for testing React and React Native apps. It provides the Developers full control over what plugins and tools they choose to use while testing applications. Its major highlights are:

• Runs on Node.js
• Provides support for asynchronous front-end and backend testing, test coverage reports, and the usage of any claims library
• Helps to track errors
• Excels in mocking tests

Enzyme

• Enzyme is another testing tool developed by Airbnb.
• It comes with API wrappers, to ease out developers’ tasks like manipulating, asserting, and traversing the React DOM.
• It supports full and shallow DOM and also supports static rendering
• Besides, it is compatible with several other testing frameworks and libraries like Mocha and Jest.

Chai

• It’s an assertion testing library meant for browser and node
• Chai employs behavior-driven and test-driven development principles
• Compatible with various testing tools and can be paired with any JS testing framework
• Its functionality can be extended by using several custom plugins
• Moreover, it enables the developers to create their plugins and share them in the community

Category: Navigation

React Navigation

• This component supports navigational patterns like tabs, stacks, and drawers
• It is based on JavaScript and is simple to use
• It enables developers to effortlessly set up app screens
• Can be completely customized as well as extended

React Router

• This is a library of navigational components which composes declaratively with the app.
• It allows one to specify named components, create various types of layouts, and pass layout components.

Category: App’s State Management

Redux

Redux, a free-standing library, and a predictable state container is predominantly used along with the UI library components of React. Besides the React ecosystem, one can also use Redux with other frameworks like Vue, Angular, Vanilla JS, Ember, etc. Its principal offerings are:

• Can be used with back-end as well as front-end libraries
• Enables the developers to write consistent codes
• Allows editing the live code
• Functions well in various environments – Server-side, client-side, and native
• Connects the pieces of state to the React components by minimizing the need for props or callbacks.

Category: Linting and checking Types

ESLint

• It’s a JavaScript-based, open-source linter tool
• ESLint is configurable and pluggable
• It improves the code consistency and makes it bug-free
• It helps in evaluating patterns in the code and eliminates errors by automatically fixing the code, to enhance the overall code quality.
• It helps detect creases in the JavaScript code that don’t comply with the standard guidelines
• It helps react native developers to create their own linting rules

Flow

• Developed by Facebook, Flow is a static type checker JavaScript library
• It easily identifies problems during coding
• It proves beneficial in crafting large applications, as it prevents bad rebases when several persons are working on a single program.
• The main objective of Flow is to make the code more precise and enhance the speed of the coding process

Category: Networking

Networking tools are used to establish a networking flow in React Native projects. Let us have a look at a few of them.

• react-native –firebase is a lightweight layer on the top of Firebase libraries. It creates a JavaScript bridge connecting to the native JavaScript SDKs to ease out using Firebase in React Native Application Development projects.
• Apollo Client is quite compatible and adaptable. It is required when the developers need to use GraphQL. It assists in creating a User Interface that pulls data with GraphQL.
• Axios, a lightweight HTTP JavaScript client was built to send asynchronous HTTP requests to REST endpoints. Besides, it performs CRUD operations.
• react-native-ble-manager is a plugin that helps in connecting and transmitting data between a mobile handset and BLE peripherals.

Category: Utils

The below-mentioned ready-made tools simplify and speed up working with Utils while developing React Native apps.

• Ramda is a library that eases out creating functional pipelines without user-data mutation.
• The JavaScript functions’ toolkit Lodash offers clean and effective methodologies to your development team for working with collections and objects.
• Reselect builds memorized selectors that are needed for avoiding unnecessary recalculation and redrawing of data. This library also quickens the speed of your app.
• Moment works with various data formats and is capable of parsing, manipulating as well as validating times and dates in JavaScript.
• js, designed by Wrap, offers the app developers a declarative way to validate JS objects

Category: Analytics

The following libraries act as mediators enabling one to implement the trending analytical tools into their React Native Mobile App Development projects.

• react-native-mixpanel is a kind of wrapper for the library named Mixpanel and helps the developers to reap all the benefits of the Mixpanel library.
• react-native-google-analytics-bridge acts as a bridge for establishing compatibility between Google Analytics tools and React Native projects.

Category: Localization

react-native-i18n helps in localizing or internationalizing applications. It integrates the i18n-js library in JavaScript for React Native applications.

Category: In-app Purchases

• react-native-in-app-utils is a small library used to implement the in-app billing procedure for iOS apps. It can be effortlessly installed and is simple to work with.
• react-native-billing is used for adding in-app billing to applications meant for the Android platform. It possesses a simple UI and wraps anjlab’s InApp Billing library to function as a bridge.

Category: AR and VR

ViroReact is used to speedily develop native cross-platform VR/AR apps in React Native. Its key functionalities are:

• It has an easy learning curve
• It comes with a high-performing native 3D rendering engine as well as a custom extension of React for creating VR and AR solutions.
• It provides support for all kinds of platforms in VR including Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, etc. for Android and iOS; and AR including Android ARCore and iOS ARKit platforms.
• Needs React-Viro-CLI and React-Native-CLI for writing cross-platform native codes

Final Verdict:

I hope the aforesaid information was helpful and has given you a clear idea of which library/libraries would be most suitable for your next project.

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