What’s the difference between React vs React Native ?

Rosy Wijewardhana
2 min readFeb 23, 2021

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What is React?

React is an open-source JavaScript library for building interactive user interfaces essentially for single-page applications. It was developed on Facebook in 2011 and currently is the most popular Js library for building user interfaces. Instagram was the first external user of React.

The main goal of React was to simplify the process of building complex and understanding user interfaces.

The Facebook team tried to build scalable interfaces and React.js was a way to make JavaScript development more manageable.

React Js permits developers to design user interface components through a virtual DOM. The virtual DOM doesn’t require a response from a browse. Thus, the code is rendered faster.

The React language of development is JSX — the combination of JavaScript and HTML.

What is React Native ?

React Native is also based on JavaScript. But it is significantly designed to build native mobile applications. Before building React Native, application developers had to use numerous tools for different platforms.

React Native allows the creation of applications across various platforms such as Windows, Android, and IOS.

  • React is an open-source JavaScript library fundamentally related to building user interfaces for web applications.
  • React Native is an open-source framework for creating cross-platform mobile applications for iOS, Android, and Windows.
  • React has no dependency on a distinct platform.
  • React Native is platform-dependent.
  • HTML tags are used in React.
  • There are no HTML tags used in React Native.
  • React navigation is allowed straight by React and is completely combined with JavaScript.
  • React Native is lightly complicated using its navigation library to navigate mobile applications.

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