React is very new, but a promising platform, that has attracted the attention of large companies who’ve released their apps already. It is interesting because of its simplicity compared to developing web applications, and because of its speed as compared with native applications.

Unlike many other popular mobile platforms, React doesn’t use JavaScript in any way. Dart is the programming language. It compiles to binary code, and that’s why it runs with the native performance of Objective-C, Swift, Java or Kotlin.

React uses a declarative approach, inspired by the React web framework, to build its UI based on widgets (named “components” in the world of the web). To get more out of widgets, they are rendered only when necessary, usually when their state has been changed (just like the Virtual DOM does for us).

React is an open-source software development kit which enables smooth and easy cross-platform mobile app development. You can build high quality natively compiled apps for iOS and Android quickly, without having to write the code for the two apps separately. All you need is one codebase for both platforms.