Getting started in React Native

What is React Native? React Native is a Javascript framework for building native mobile apps using React. Why React Native? Imagine being able to create an app for both iOS and Android using one code base! Have you ever used mobile versions of Facebook? Instagram? AirBnB? These apps are written using React Native!

Let’s get started!

An easy way to get started coding in React Native is using expo-cli. To install it, we run:

npm install -g expo-cli

After it’s installed we can start a new project by typing

expo init NameOfProject

For this tutorial, I will be using the blank managed workflow template

A Blank Canvas

Let’s take a look at what we have now that we initialized a new project.

Our file structure looks very similar to a React project. Let’s look inside the App.js file