Versapay: Digital Payments Mobile Strategy

REASON 1

You Can Create Great Native-Like Experiences Across Multiple Operating Systems

REASON 2

It Focuses on Developer Efficiency Across All the Platforms You Care About

REASON 3

It's Native, Really!

REASON 4

You Can Reload "Instantly" with Fast Refresh and Modern Debugging Tools You Know

REASON 5

It’s Developed by Facebook, but It’s Open-Source

REASON 6

It’s Flexible

REASON 7

It Has a Big and Active Community

REASON 8

Great Companies Are Using It

REASON 9

There Are Great Integrations To Make Your Job Easier

REASON 10

Amazing Resources Are Available Online To Get Started

IN CONCLUSION

React Native Is the Way to Go for Many Reasons

React Native created the ability to produce real Native iOS and Android Apps with a single codebase, and has changed mobile app development in a big way.

We’ve dedicated a lot of time to mastering React Native, and it’s by far our favorite framework of choice when developing mobile apps.

Here are the reasons why we love it, and recommend it so often.

React Native produces real Native iOS and Android Apps with a single codebase, and its changed mobile app development in a big way. This is why we love it.

10 Reasons Why We Love React Native *And Why You Should Too

Discover why more and more companies are choosing React Native to build innovative digital products.

Why CTOs Should Choose React Native as Mobile Platform

I’ll be honest, for the first eight years after iOS was released, building an application natively within iOS made sense and was the only proper decision to make. 

 had promise but lacked many core features and UX experiences that it didn’t make sense to switch over.

Native apps are considered the gold standard and offer the best overall performance, user experience, and access to hardware-related features such as support for multi-touch gestures, access to the camera, GPS, calendar, accelerometer, and much more.

But now the mobile world has moved on and React Native is the right decision for many companies.

React Native has transformed the whole dualistic notion of iOS vs. Android by creating beautiful apps for both platforms from one codebase—without compromising on the UX and UI. On a React Native app, everything you see and touch is native.

So unless you are Uber or Airbnb and can afford to spend money and time on exclusive native mobile development, your business really should be using React Native as its development platform of choice.

The reason is fairly straightforward. With React Native, you have a best-in-class framework that is optimal for 95% of all business use cases.

React Native is especially good news for CTOs and VPs of Engineering because instead of hiring two additional development teams for Android and iOS, you can leverage your existing web development team to build your mobile app. React Native represents the best organizational choice for CTOs and VPs today.

I didn’t want to start with this because I don’t think “

” is a valid excuse, but the maturity of React Native makes it an easier business case for your organization.

React Native was introduced in 2015 and underwent the initial stable release in July 2019. Over the past four years, it has become a robust worldwide open-source community with over 

 contributors on GitHub—and, of course, with the backing of Facebook. It’s also the 

 of contributors for any repository on GitHub in 2018.

React Native developers are continually building new libraries, updates, and projects. With cross-platform compatibility, shorter development cycles, faster releases, live code pushes and updates, and overall performance improvements, many have come to see React Native as the future of mobile development.

Facebook originally developed React Native as a hackathon to support its cross-platform needs. The beauty of React Native is that, unlike “hybrid” mobile app solutions, it uses native UI elements instead of rendering the entire application inside of a WebView. Your business logic is run in a separate JavaScript thread, which then controls the native UI elements. In the “old days,” companies had to develop native apps for both Android and iOS from scratch.

React Native allows developers to write code in just one language, JavaScript, then build binaries for Android and iOS. It eliminates the need to hire both iOS and Android developers to write dual applications, and this represents a huge benefit in terms of productivity, costs, and time to market. Not to mention the reduced hiring burden!

As a CTO, you’re most comfortable managing a company you understand. If you happen to be an Android “guy and need to hire an iOS developer, you’re not speaking the same language and have to work extra cycles to get everyone on the same page. This can easily lead to operations hang-ups and production slowdowns.

Being able to write once and port across each major platform means a considerable improvement in the operation of your organization. The ability to place resources on different projects and not have to worry about skillsets and whether a developer can write Swift, Objective-C, Kotlin, or Java is a huge relief.

Nearly 67% of all developers use JavaScript already, so it’s an easy sell for using React Native to improve operational efficiency across the enterprise.

There are many ways React Native saves organizations time and money. Obviously, the “one code for all” is a huge advantage as it cuts down on the learning curve and the number of hands on deck required for developing an application. It’s also open source and has a robust and growing community of ready-made components and support.

In fact, something like 95% of the React Native codebase is shared between iOS and Android. These are just some of the many reasons why React Native leads to significant improvements in ROI over hiring native developers.

As good as React Native is for all-around performance, cost savings, and portability, a few use cases will stand out that require a pure native look and feel. These are going to be the high-end enterprises, such as Airbnb and Uber that have money to spend on super-polishing their native application.

For the “rest of us,” which means 90%-95% of the business use cases, React Native will provide your organization with a highly engaging enterprise application. In other words, the reasons for not using React Native are going to be negligible.

In terms of cost-savings, increased efficiencies, and the overall native look and feel that users experience, React Native is a no-brainer!

Yes, not every app should be built with React Native. Here are some reasons to go full native:

You’re creating something with complex animations and interactions, like an interactive game.

You’re building something that’s CPU intensive, like editing photos. In that case, you could either go full native or write the complex logic in native and bridge it to React Native.

You’re creating something out-of-the-box with unconventional UI patterns. Native might be a better choice in that case.

For CTO’s, quickly getting the right products to market is all that matters. As a “learn once, write everywhere” framework, React Native cuts down enormously on the cycles required to develop and deploy user-friendly and engaging products to market. React Native is arguably one of the biggest breakthroughs in mobile application development in recent years.

, this cross-compatible platform has transformed the way companies develop enterprise-grade applications—with less learning curves, shorter development cycles, faster releases, and overall cost savings.

We’ve been using React Native since I founded the company and aren’t looking back anytime soon. You can learn more about our React Native development services 

P.S. If you’re trying to decide between React Native and other cross-platform mobile frameworks, 

Why CTOs Should Choose React Native as Their Mobile Development Platform

Let's compare the best cross-platform app frameworks (React Native, Ionic, Cordova, PhoneGap) to develop for iOS and Android at the same time.

Comparing Ionic vs Cordova vs PhoneGap vs React Native

I set out to build an app for myself called 

 (it’s the insider’s guide to the city).

I looked into the cross-platform frameworks available so I could build it for both iOS 

 — Apps created with these frameworks are basically websites created with HTML, CSS, & Javascript, smushed into app form. It 

 like an app. When you interact with the app, it feels slightly sluggish and not responsive.

 — This framework take an entirely different approach to hybrid cross-platform apps, and uses native UI elements, powered by Javascript. You write your app in Javascript, then 

 works some magic and turns the user interface into 

. This means that when you touch & feel your app, it 

React Native apps are snappy, responsive, and a joy to use.

. I argue that it takes less than half the time to build an app compared to full native apps, because not only do you have to build an app once instead of twice, it’s just faster to build the first app period.

Under the hood, React Native uses Javascript to run the business logic, for example handling a button click or fetching data from a server.

Technically it does this with a headless browser. Because of this if you don’t program the app right, you may see some slowness.

There are ways in which to program the app however that eliminate this problem and the user will never know the difference between a pure native app and a React Native app.

Companies including Instagram, Facebook (parts of their app), Bloomberg, & Skype (

From a technical perspective, it wins some points because it uses technology many developers already know: Javascript and React. Web developers don’t have to learn an entirely new language (Objective C, Swift, or Java); they just apply the skills they already have to a new form factor, mobile.

So how did the app come out? Speakeasy is snappy, responsive, and I bet you couldn’t tell it’s a React Native app.

React Native strikes the perfect balance in creating cross-platform apps because it’s super fast to build them and the apps look 

 feel like native mobile apps. The end result is a polished, snappy and responsive mobile app.

You write the apps in Javascript, which is one of the most popular programming languages and use the React framework which is a revolutionary and brilliant framework.

React Native isn’t great for games or anything with complex animations. But for most apps that simply display and let you edit data, it’s a great choice.

React Native is a great choice for 80% of the apps out there.

I envisioned a mobile app development company that takes a radically different approach to building apps.

How We Create Beautiful Mobile Apps in Half the Time

Here’s the story of why I created Foxbox Digital, a different kind of mobile app development company.

 we needed to build a mobile app to complement our existing web app. We were a team of web developers and didn’t have experience building iOS or Android apps. We reached out to some local app development companies in Chicago to get quotes on what it would take to build the app. The quotes were really high, and that was for 

. And after that, we’d need to have them build the Android app too.

We’re responsible for hosting and supporting the API that actually runs the app. We ended up finding a freelance iOS developer to build the app, and he did a killer job. It cost a ton of money though, and at the end of the day we could only support half our users because the other half were on Android.

 I understand why mobile app development companies charge so much for a mobile app — developers are expensive, and in-demand. But isn’t there a better way?

, Ionic, and Cordova. Ionic and Cordova apps look like native mobile apps, but they don’t feel like them — they’re slow and sluggish. React Native strikes the perfect balance because they’re fast to build, and the apps look and feel like native mobile apps (snappy and responsive). And it’s simply a joy to program the code. 

With a cross-platform framework like React Native, we build both the iOS app and the Android app at the same time. 

This cuts the development time (and cost) in half

Through our engagement with Home Chef, we developed and published both iOS and Android apps using React Native.

This helped them significantly increase app store ratings, meal kit conversions, and user engagement rates. 

The mobile app is only part of the solution though — every mobile app needs an API to power the app. An API is the server and software that the app communicates with in order to do what it needs to do (i.e. get and store data). Once you have an API built, you need to host and maintain it. As a client, do you want to be bothered to maintain an API?

I thought about all of the things that you need to do in order to keep your app up and running in the app stores.

Mobile App — build it, launch it, maintain it (fix bugs and security issues).

API — build it, build servers to host it, maintain it.

Monitor the API to ensure it stays running and respond to issues as they come up.

Upgrade the mobile app every time Apple or Google releases a new phone or operating system. Re-release to both app stores.

Do clients really want to do all of this?

 We’d use reusable building blocks to create the core of the app, and a finely tuned process to develop them. With this approach, it’s much easier to predict how long it will take to build the app.

 that handles everything from design to building clients’ apps to keeping them up & running, for the life of the apps. We’d be a trusted partner to our clients, so they wouldn’t have to worry about anything involved in building or running their mobile apps.

Foxbox Digital creates beautiful cross-platform mobile apps  in half the time. We handle everything involved in running and maintaining your app, for the life of the app.

 and let's come up with a strategy to build it.