Common Mistakes That May Crop Up In React Native App Development

React Native is an open-source user interface-based software platform used for multiplatform app development such as iOS, Android, Windows, and web applications. Developed by Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2015, it is more of a UI generator framework rather than an entirely new system, one that can generate UI elements from JavaScript codebase.

The major USP of React Native is the scalability and versatility that allows developers to write the code just once and run it on any platform. Many major apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Skype, Uber, Walmart run on React Native.

As the platform is still gaining traction, many web development companies are looking to hire React Native app developers either full-time or on a contractual basis, with React Native app developers from Upwork being a hiring platform of choice.

The massive community support for the framework has resulted in its astounding success, and yet the demand for developers who can work in React Native exceeds the supply.

This has resulted in many companies looking to hire developers who are not well versed in React Native and have zero experience in the framework to develop apps, for it is usually believed that a JavaScript expert can naturally work with React Native which is not as easy as it sounds.

When hiring React Native app developers, one has to look for their experience in the framework for the development process to go smoothly. There can be a host of things that can go wrong if a React Native app developer from Upwork is not well versed in how to work with the framework. Here are some common mistakes that may crop up during app development using React Native.

1. Unreliable Coding Methods

The right way to plan and implement a code is by first deciding what exactly the code is intended to do, how it ties up with the rest of the code, and how deeply it will be integrated, and only then start writing the code.

Unreliable coding practices include inadequate planning where codes are extensively modified from time to time depending on the situation. This can create complexities with React Native and may result in unexpected and undesirable results. It is important for developers to have separate life cycles and code planning in order to smoothly work with React Native.

Many developers often loosen their development processes due to React Native’s widescale scalability across platforms, but they have to be wary of any minor changes that are required for different renders.

2. Reusability Issues

React Native allows developers to reuse codes, which is the major USP of the framework in the first place. However, one of the most common mistakes many developers do is to reuse the entire code for different platforms, which obviously is wrong.

While the codebase can be the same, the endpoints and backends should be checked in order to create a versatile layout for different platforms. One cannot use the exact same code for both mobile and web apps, for both will require a bit of tweaking and resizing in order to scale across platforms.

3. Incompatible Modules

Using external modules is commonplace in coding. Developers often borrow external code elements via external modules to save time and make things much easier.

However, with React Native, many external modules often don’t work properly, especially the ones that are not written with React Native’s UI generation framework in mind. Tracking and maintaining external modules across platforms is also time-consuming and requires dependency on others in order to go through with the application development.

Hence, when hiring React Native app developers, developers must look at their dependency on external modules and their own set of skills in order to ensure a smooth development process. Sorting out incompatibility and resource-hogging modules takes out valuable time from the project and may result in a poor user experience.

4. Dependence on Stateless Component

During the early stages of React Native application development, stateless components were a nice option to boost the performance of the framework without doing any heavy lifting in the codebase. Simply put, a stateless component is one that does not have any state of its own and simply shows whatever it has been assigned.

This was considered very fast as it did not have to ping back to a server every time it was executed. However, in the world of live internet apps, stateless components are now considered unreliable as they do not show live and the latest server data, which is absolutely crucial in today’s internet-connected apps.

The pure component has now been slowly replacing the stateless components in React Native framework, for it has a life cycle method that checks the server for the latest updates. A major disadvantage of stateless components is that they are dependent on a parent component for re-rendering of data whereas pure components re-render data automatically whenever a change in state is identified. Many developers are now using pure components, especially for data-heavy apps.

5. Image Optimization Issues

Images are the single largest data hogs on any codebase (apart from videos). That is why developers have to optimize images properly in order to provide a good user experience and even more so in React Native where unoptimized images can dramatically affect the performance of applications.

Developers using React Native must ensure image optimization via different means such as image resizing, local image caching, switching to WebP image format to drastically increase image optimization, and using PNGs instead of JPG or JPEG wherever possible.

This will help increase the app performance and free up storage and memory for faster app operation. Local image caching is a must-have feature that stores image data locally on the user device for lightning-fast rendering and retrieving.

6. Absence of Unit Testing

Unit testing is a process where individual pieces of the main code are isolated and run to check whether they are working as intended or not. For example, when creating a user-based image sharing app, one unit testing can be to isolate the image upload code and check whether it is working as intended or not.

This allows developers to ensure that whenever any errors occur in the code base, they can easily identify the working components and separate the troublesome modules without spending much time debugging everything.

Many developers often skip unit testing to accelerate the development process, which is done to quickly finish a project. This is not always a good idea, for any glitches in the code may affect the entire project. It also helps developers troubleshoot any post-launch issues very quickly and efficiently.

7. Direct State Mutation

Set State function captures the new state of data and compares it with old data. The view function shows the data as presented on the screen, usually the updated data. React Native uses this function to retrieve and update previous data periodically.

Many developers may accidentally (or intentionally) use direct state mutation which can corrupt all previous states, leading to unexpected app behavior and ultimately crashing/force close. Hence it is advisable to avoid direct state implementation in order to avoid a set of heavy application errors.