React Native: Bringing modern web techniques to mobile
Facebook welcomes us, developers, all to their new shiny technology to develop Native apps with JavaScript.
We've been using React Native in production at Facebook for some time now, and while there's still a ton of work to do, it's been working really well for us. It's worth noting that we're not chasing “write once, run anywhere.” Different platforms have different looks, feels, and capabilities, and as such, we should still be developing discrete apps for each platform, but the same set of engineers should be able to build applications for whatever platform they choose, without needing to learn a fundamentally different set of technologies for each. We call this approach “learn once, write anywhere.”
If you have an iPhone, you can test out a few apps using React Native that are available from the App Store. Facebook Groups is a hybrid application, consisting of views built both with native code and React Native JavaScript, and Facebook Ads Manager is built entirely using React Native.