Exploring the React Native architecture
Before understanding how React Native works, let’s revisit some historical points about the React architecture and the differences between web and native mobile apps.
The state of web and mobile apps in the past
Meta released React in 2013 as a monolith tool for creating apps, using a component approach and a virtual DOM. It gave us the opportunity to develop web applications without thinking about browser processes, such as parsing JS code, creating the DOM, and handling layers and rendering. We just had to create interfaces using state and props for data and CSS for styling, fetch data from the backend, save it in local storage, and so on.
React, together with browsers, allowed us to create a performance application in less time. At that time, the architecture of React looked like this:
Figure 16.1: React architecture in 2013
The new declarative approach to developing interfaces became more favorable because...
