Dipping My Toes into React Native

Sometimes you just get a curious itch. Tonight that itch has been React Native! I’ve been happily building mobile apps with Flutter for a while now and honestly I love Flutter. It’s a fantastic framework. But I was intrigued by the idea of exploring something different.

So I decided to take the plunge and try building something small in React Native. The initial setup was surprisingly smooth thanks to Expo it really simplifies things.

I wanted to get the camera view rendering on my iPhone and it took a bit of tinkering. iOS permissions are always fun but after some digging and a rebuild I had it working. I used https://github.com/mrousavy/react-native-vision-camera to this. It is a nifty React Native camera library that is fully spec’d.

Here’s what I was able to implement in an hour:

It’s early days but it's been a refreshing experience exploring a different approach to mobile development. The framework feels quite different from Flutter and I’m enjoying learning a new way of doing things.

Right now, I'm just focused on getting the basics working and exploring what’s possible. It’s a fun little side project and I’m excited to see where it goes.

Maybe I’ll share a few updates as I progress but for now just wanted to share my little whim and the joy of exploring new technologies. Sometimes it’s good to just scratch that curious itch!