React Native application development : A comparison between native Android and React Native

Creating a mobile application often requires the developers to create one for Android och one for iOS, the two leading operating systems for mobile devices. The two applications may have the same layout and logic but several components of the user interface (UI) will differ and the applications themselves need to be developed in two different languages. This process is gruesome since it is time consuming to create two applications and it requires two different sets of knowledge. There have been attempts to create techniques, services or frameworks in order to solve this problem but these hybrids have not been able to provide a native feeling of the resulting applications. This thesis has evaluated the newly released framework React Native that can create both iOS and Android applications by compiling the code written in React. The resulting applications can share code and consists of the UI components which are unique for each platform. The thesis focused on Android and tried to replicate an existing Android application in order to measure user experience and performance. The result was surprisingly positive for React Native as some user could not tell the two applications apart and nearly all users did not mind using a React Native application. The performance evaluation measured GPU frequency, CPU load, memory usage and power consumption. Nearly all measurements displayed a performance advantage for the Android application but the differences were not protruding. The overall experience is that React Native a very interesting framework that can simplify the development process for mobile applications to a high degree. As long as the application itself is not too complex, the development is uncomplicated and one is able to create an application in very short time and be compiled to both Android and iOS