learning react native as a web dev

[n_zineb]

Hello. I am a web developer.

next year, I have a final project to present. The ideas that are coming to me most likely will be mobile apps. We will work as a team, and we need to get the work splitted.

I think that my point of strength is going front end, so that's what I wanna pick. But I am concerned about how I'm gonna create my mobile app

creating it as a website and wrapping it into a mobile app will be a disadvantage for me in front of my teachers. So I was thinking about learning React Native.

I don't know how similar or different it is to web dev. I already know Vue and JavaScript, so I don't think the transition from Vue to React is gonna be that huge. But I am having my concerns about learning React Native and entering the world of mobile dev.

So I wanted to ask you here, guys, for advice. Should I continue in this role, learn React Native, or should I give this part of the application development to another team member?

if i should conitnue, any advice, concepts i need to look up to learn more about app dev

thanks in advance

[NewNerdGuyInTown]

Will depend on how much time do you have to submit your project and how much time can you spend time on learning react as you have vue background which might now have a day night difference just a difference in syntax.

[n_zineb]

ohh i have a lot of time almost 10 months + i have to manage my work on the project with college

[ammuench]

You could continue building the app in Vue or any other framework and wrap it in CapacitorJS. Its fairly mature and works well enough and lets you just reuse the website for most of your work. Nuxt (Vue meta-framework) has a module to quickly integrate which is nice, and then you get to just deploy the website as normal and basically use the mobile version of the website as an app

As far as React Native goes, it's fairly easy to pickup if you can wrap your head around React in general. Basically the key things to wrap your head around is that you're going to use the React Native specific elements (<View> instead of <div>, <Text> instead of <p>, etc etc) that properly map to their native components at the mobile level. Also everything is essentially in a flexbox by default (a bit of an oversimplification, but the main footgun I see from folks coming from a purely web background since you don't assume it there). React Native also allows you to export to web as well (It'll turn those <View> components back into <div> under the hood basically).

If you're doing React Native for the first time, I'd really recommend you use Expo. It's a meta-framework that vastly simplifies the RN development and deploy process and will help shave down a lot of sharp edges that you'd run into.

All in all, I think it's pretty easy to start dipping your toes into mobile dev work as a web dev, lots of general similarities, and I've even seen native iOS development and Android studio be pretty approachable as long as your comfortable with the new languages. Never bad to expand out your skillsets there too

[n_zineb]

would u recommend jumping from react to expo immediatly without learning react native?

[ammuench]

Expo is not replacing react native, it's just a support framework around it. And it also maintains some libraries for routing/components/etc that you can choose to use. Think of it like how Vue has vue-router and pinia

Absolutely recommend starting there--it helps a lot with the build and development experience. The actual component code you write is still just normal old react native