React Native

Going over the history of React Native

Back in 2012, Facebook announced they were becoming a mobile-first company. Facebook realized its users spend more time on their phones than on computers. They needed to have their websites and apps working seamlessly on smart devices. However, the majority of Facebook engineers were web developers. The company started researching options to reuse the knowledge of those web developers for mobile development. After trying out a few different ideas, they didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of Ionic, enclosing the apps inside WebViews. They needed something new.

That is when a developer named Christopher Chedeau made his mark on the history of software development. He teamed up with Jordan Walke, Ashwin Bharambe, and Lin He for an internal Facebook hackathon. Basing their work on the first attempts done by Jordan—who, by this time, had been able to generate UILabel in iOS from JavaScript—they created a working prototype that could generate native UI elements from JavaScript on the user device. And it took them only two days!

After this initial success, Jordan and Christopher, with an entire team of engineers, were able to continue working on their new product named React Native.