Mobile App Development With React Native

Welcome to mobile app development with React Native. In the following modules, we are going to learn the basics of mobile app development using the popular React Native framework.

We are going to learn how to build impressive and interactive app UIs, and deploy them so that anyone can install them on their mobile phones.

We are going to use Expo for most of our building. Expo (from Google) is an open-source platform for making universal native apps for Android, iOS and the web with JavaScript and React. Expo will be handling a lot of the overhead so that we can focus on building our apps.

With that being said, below are the prerequisites before we begin typing away.

Prerequisites for coding

Before we can begin typing away, we need to get a few things out of the way:

1. Install a code editor to write your programs. I personally prefer Visual Studio Code (opens in a new tab) but you are free to use whatever code editor you are comfortable with such as Atom, Sublime Text, Webstorm or even Notepad.
2. If you don't have access to a code editor or you are unable to install one, then there are online code editors that work brilliantly even on mobile phones. However, if you are just beginning to learn how to code, I don't recommend that you start with an online code editor because they do a lot of things under the hood, which you can only learn when you are doing them yourself.

• Examples of online code editors are:
  1. Snack (opens in a new tab)
  • Snack is the online code editor for React Native, and I highly recommend it. (This statement is NOT sponsored ;)
  2. Codesandbox (opens in a new tab)
  • When using codesandbox, since you can't run an emulator with it, ensure that your phone is on the same network as your machine so that you can scan then QR code you will be provided with, and run the app on your physical device.
  5. VsCode.dev (opens in a new tab)
  • VSCode on the web.

3. A passion to learn. Sometimes it's easy to begin something, but it can become hard to see it all the way through. I hope this documentation is easy to understand to help you through to the end.

Prerequisites for coding in React Native

1. Install Android Studio on your local development machine.
2. Install Java 8 or Java 11 on your machine.