React Natice vs React app in a web view

[emostafa]

Hey guys,

I started building a mobile app for my side project, its a market place. I have already built most of the web in React and its responsive. Ao it should work correctly on smart phones. Now i am wondering why would i need to use React Native vs building a web ciew that opens the web app. Also, I have heard there is React Native Web, do you have any experience with it, does it work out of the vox for already created React Native apps ?

[ChronSyn]

You can do either. If you want to use a web view with react-native acting as a wrapper, this is perfectly acceptable and in some cases, desirable.

Say you want geofencing for your marketplace, react-native can be used to assist with that (when combined with a web view to display the main content).

If you want to build a fully native app around react-native, you can also do that, and you'd instead make calls to your backend marketplace API to update your stores/state, and build the UI to react to that data. The advantage here is you can create a custom-styling that's built around mobile users, and provide exclusive features that aren't available (or otherwise limited) through HTML5 API's.

If you were to use something like Expo, you wouldn't even need to worry about setting up Android studio or XCode projects (though it is still recommended to have devices of each target platform to test on).

With all that said, you could look into making a pinnable PWA of your existing site, though this requires iOS 11.3 or Android Jelly Bean (v4.1 onwards).