Introducing React Native on Ubuntu

Application development for mobile and desktop using web technologies is becoming increasingly popular. If you are one of these developers then Ubuntu has a great choice of frameworks you can use to create new apps.

The Webapps team at Canonical is always focused on ensuring the right frameworks are available to developers. The Cordova framework is one such framework that is very well supported with set of Ubuntu specific APIs and has gained a lot attention and traction with developers.

Expanding this support for web application development, we are announcing the support for the very popular React Native framework. Based on the web-friendly ReactJS declarative programming model and its strong UI component system, React Native provides an additional layer of system performance using native UI components and platform APIs to deliver a deeply integrated user experience.

Now that Ubuntu is part of the React developer community, developers can use the Ubuntu React Native framework to port existing iOS or Android React Native applications, or build an Ubuntu native version of an existing ReactJS web application. You can start leveraging your web-dev skills using the source code for React Native Ubuntu here.

The development tools are fully supportive of snaps and incorporate an easy basis to create a snap and publish it to any Snappy Store, therefore giving the app much greater relevance across devices built for mobile, desktop, IoT etc.

One especially interesting context for React Native Ubuntu app development is convergence. Ubuntu on devices today supports a full range of displays, interfaces and inputs. So a React Native app ported to Ubuntu will also work on converged devices running a full Ubuntu PC interface. This gives the app a new set of user contexts since it is now used alongside typical desktop apps as well as mobile apps. Ubuntu dynamically scales the app to the display, provides it with its own windowed environment so your app is visible and running on displays where multiple apps are in use at the same time, with both touch friendly and pointer window controls. Ubuntu works with React Native so the application easily “reacts” to converged environments. To find out more on what’s possible with React Native on Ubuntu, see the Ubuntu Developer discussion on this new announcement here.