React Native: 10 years 🎊
Today, March 26, 2025, is the 10 year anniversary of React Native being open sourced!
Let’s go all the way back to 2015, just to set the scene. The iPhone 6s was released with “3D Touch” technology, Apple also released the first Apple Watch, and TikTok wouldn’t be invented until the next year.
In the web community, React.js (released a couple years prior) was growing incredibly fast. In those days, the alternatives were Ember, Angular, Backbone, Knockout, and Meteor, but React was outpacing them all.
On the native side, your choices were even more limited. You could write an iOS native app in Objective-C and another for Android in Java. Or you could use a poorly performing webview wrapper app with PhoneGap/Cordova, roll the dice with a buggy tech like Appcelerator Titanium, Xamarin, or RubyMotion, or just tell the world that Apple sucks and they should go to your website on their mobile browser.
Then Tom Occhino announced React Native at ReactConf 2015. He demoed a movies app running a very early version of React Native, live on stage, as well as the Facebook Groups app. Rendering native views but orchestrating them with JavaScript was an absolutely mind-blowing moment.
Reactions were mixed at the time. James Long, who got an early preview, was impressed:
Sidenote: look at that
React.createClass({ ... })syntax,Bundler.registerComponent(...), no JSX!
Brian Cardarella was disappointed, but also impressed; mostly concerned about what it meant for Facebook’s investment into web:
Even one of the UIKit programmers, Andy Matuschak, chimed in:
That brings us to the day ten years ago today: when Facebook open sourced React Native, March 26, 2015.
React Native Open Sourced — March 26, 2015
Facebook released the iOS version of React Native with this blog post:
Even after a decade, it holds up. Go give it a read!
What struck me the most is how well the vision aligns with today.
- Native user experience
React Native uses platform-specific UI elements which are performant and feel like a native iOS or Android app - Developer experience of the web
Native development experience lags behind the web in many ways, and RN bridges that gap - Code sharing (learn once, write anywhere)
Developers can use a common skillset across many platforms — web, iOS, and Android, with other platforms possible as well - Incremental adoption
You can sprinkle in React Native into an existing native app or build a full React Native app from scratch - Open source collaboration
It’s not just Facebook building this — it’s a full community, which makes it stronger
Infinite Red’s first look at React Native
The first person to see its potential in our Slack at Infinite Red was my cofounder, Todd Werth. In March 2015, Todd and I were already talking about merging our companies into one. Both companies were doing native iOS and Android development at the time, and my company also did web (mainly Rails and Ember).
We went on to discuss it. I was a fan of React, but skeptical of JSX and JavaScript in general. Todd liked JavaScript as a language, but we were still figuring it out.
(In case you’re wondering, this is the statically compiled JSX that Todd was referring to.)
Sidenote: Reading through this conversation to prepare for this article was fun! A blast from the past.
I speculated it was just a view layer like React.js, but then found out they implemented a large runtime with network calls and more … and I started getting impressed. Todd was more focused on the business value it could provide — one code base, deploy to two platforms — it seemed like a no-brainer.
Ultimately, we shelved the discussion for a while as we got ready for a conference — the same conference we’d end up deciding to officially merge our two consultancies into the new Infinite Red. (If you’re interested in hearing more about that story, check out our 13 episode podcast mini-series, Building Infinite Red.)
React Native Android Released
Later that year in September 2015, Facebook released the Android version of React Native.
Soon after, we got our first sales inquiry about potentially using React Native. And the pressure was on.
The founders of Infinite Red had several discussions during that time. We saw that React Native had real momentum and potential, but we had a lot more work to do. Our team had to be on board, and we needed some guinea pigs / client projects to pilot this new technology on.
Todd took React Native for a test drive on a demo app, and we started putting out feelers to clients with new projects starting soon. Two of the biggest projects gave the green light to try React Native on their projects, both starting in early October, 2015 — right after Infinite Red, Inc. was officially incorporated. Our two top developers, Gant Laborde and Steve Kellock, ran each of those and started collaborating on what would eventually become Ignite a few months later.
It didn’t take long for our team to dive right in! Some baffling issues, some overhype, but a lot of excitement.
(Aside: I now host that React Native Radio podcast that Darin mentioned, with Robin Heinze and Mazen Chami!)
In a lot of ways, our journey at Infinite Red has mirrored React Native’s. We started with many startup clients and few enterprise, and over the years that has reversed as React Native has matured and become more widely accepted as a primary mobile technology.
React Native’s Impact
It’s so fun to look back and realize just how much Infinite Red has been impacted by and built on this wonderful technology, becoming world-known React Native experts over the past decade.
But it hasn’t just impacted us. React Native has transformed teams, enabled new businesses, shortened development cycles, allowed web developers to use their existing skills to move more easily into the mobile app world, and even helped achieve more parity between iOS and Android in general.
One thing I am pretty sure about: React Native isn’t going anywhere.
React Native continues to get more and more popular, with downloads up over 40% in the last year, and climbing.
And it will also get better in the next few years:
- Better adoption of the new architecture, in apps as well as libraries
- Better default performance out of the box
- Better debugging tools
- React Compiler integration (better DX, performance, reliability)
- Static Hermes — natively compiled TypeScript
- More mature ecosystem and framework in general
- Expo becoming the “default” tech for building new mobile apps
I can’t wait! Here’s to the next decade of React Native! 🎉
P.S. Join us on the journey by checking out React Native Radio, subscribing to our YouTube channel, and signing up for React Native Newsletter!
