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Today we are going to develop our first React Native application. In this tutorial I am going to directly jump into coding without explain code much. You don’t need to know all sort of technical jargon to write your first React Native application.

 

This application just prints “Hello World” text on your phone screen. This application can run on Android or iOS device without any code change. This is the power of React Native. You can run your application both Android or iOS devices with minimum code change and most of the code common for both platforms.

 

Before write any code you need to setup your development environment, if you haven’t done yet. You can get all the information here to setup your React Native Development Environment.

Creating a new application

To create new application, you have to use React Native built-in command line interface. You can access it without installing anything globally using npx, which ships with Node.js. Let's create a new React Native project called "HelloWorld":

 

npx react-native init HelloWorld

 

You need to modify App.js file as below to print “Hello World” on your phone screen.

First two lines import "react" and "react-native" components. Then write simple function called "HelloWorldApp" and it just return "Hello, world!" text.

Finally, default export of "HelloWorldApp" function for rendering.

Next step is to run your application. Below command run your application either on your emulator or mobile device. If you want to test your application on the emulator you have to load your emulator. If you want to test your application on your phone you have to connect your phone via USB port to computer and run below command.

npx react-native start

This will load metro server.

Then run your application, run below command.

npx react-native run-android

Now you can see your code is running like this.

Now modify your code and see how the changes are reflecting. This is very simple code, but good starting point. Next we try to develop some basic React Native Calculator application.

Many Windows based Android developers are facing difficulties in running Android Studio on Windows machines due to lack of performance issues. But if you are developing mobile application using language like React Native you don’t actually need to work on Android Studio. But most of the time you have to use Android Emulators to test your application. If your windows machine does not have at least 16 GB of RAM you always face severe performance issue while running Android Emulators.

 

One solution to this issue is you can use your mobile phone to test react native application without running on Android Emulators. For that you only need to run Metro server on your PC and test application run on your mobile phone. But this method has drawbacks you have only one platform to test your application. If you want to test your application on multiple platforms you have to use several Emulators with different Android versions and architectures.

 

Another solution is without load your Android Studio if you can use Android Emulators alone that will give better performance. For that you can use command line to load Android Emulators.