57 posts tagged with "Best Practices"

Offline-first React Native apps need deliberate data design. Lightweight preferences can use AsyncStorage, but serious offline workflows need structured local data, queued writes, sync conflict handling, retries, and visible user states.

Dark mode in React Native should start with system appearance APIs and a real theme model. This guide now focuses on useColorScheme, Appearance, app-level overrides, design tokens, and production checks across native and JavaScript surfaces.

In this tutorial, we are going to give a quick introduction to React Native hooks. Hooks in React are available since the version 16.7.0-alpha. These functions allow us to use React state and a component’s lifecycle methods in a functional component. If you are familiar with React, you know that the functional component has been called as a functional stateless component. Not any more.

Perceived performance is how fast an app feels to the user. A screen can take the same amount of time to load, but feel much faster when it shows immediate feedback, preserves user work, avoids blank states, and explains what is happening.

Entrepreneurs, designers, and developers tend to separate Growth aspects from the mobile app development process. They are usually perceived as completely different focus areas. After all, what does marketing have to do with app development, right? Because of this, many startups fall into the trap of building onboarding screens that are so beautiful it blows the user’s mind, but they are not optimized for Growth, hence don’t convert well.

Optional imports are useful when a React Native app has platform-specific code, feature-gated screens, optional assets, or native modules that should only load in one environment. They are also easy to misuse. Metro still needs to know what files can be bundled, so arbitrary runtime strings are not a good import strategy.

Phones, tablets, and foldables have status bars, notches, camera cutouts, rounded corners, gesture home indicators, and navigation bars. A React Native screen that looks fine on one simulator can still hide content under system UI on another device.

The modern solution is react-native-safe-area-context. The older SafeAreaView exported from React Native core is deprecated and should not be the default choice for new work.

React Native projects collect several kinds of local state while you work: Metro cache, Watchman watches, node_modules, CocoaPods, Gradle build output, and Xcode DerivedData. Cleaning all of them at once can fix some painful build issues, but it can also create new problems if you delete lockfiles or update native dependencies accidentally.

This guide shows a safer cleanup order. Start with the smallest cache reset that matches the symptom, then move down the checklist only if the problem remains.

Redux is a popular React and React Native state management library, meant to be used in complex React and React Native apps where sharing state between multi-level components can get extremely difficult to manage. In this article we are going to learn how to use Redux with React Hooks by building a real React Native app.