Top 12 React Native Tools for Developers

Companies these days choose to design and construct their apps using React Native because they don't need to employ two teams of developers supporting two separate code bases, one for iOS and the other for Android.

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One of the typical misconceptions regarding React Native is that developers can't use it to build serious apps, believing that utilizing native languages and tools is the only way to create any serious application. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Skype, and Uber Eats were all built with React Native. 

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React Native Technology Makes Development Simpler

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By introducing many features that make development easier for developers and help teams understand different aspects of this framework, developers can create one set of coding using JavaScript while enhancing the performance of the respective native application. 

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You can read more on the benefits of React Native and its importance in the mobile development world in our previous article, "What is React Native? Why is it so demanded?" here. This article will focus on the best React Native tools and plugins to make development teams' lives easier in 2022.

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Best React Native tools for developers

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Here are the best React Native tools in 2022 for developers to commence, scale, and complete development cycles for all their projects.

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Atom

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Launched by GitHub in 2014 as an open-source text editor, it made its place in developing React Native Applications on Mac, Linux, and Windows. One of Atom's best features is allowing developers to add other open-source packages to enhance the features and functionality of your web app.

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Atom is a cross-platform editing tool that development teams can use to work on diverse platforms like Windows, Android, iOS, and Linux. In addition to editing, it offers good themes, an integrated package manager, cross-platform editing, and smart auto-completion.

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Nuclide

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Facebook developed Nuclide to provide the most satisfactory IDE experience for React Native users in 2015. It is an open-source editor with services like working sets and remote development.

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It has a built-in debugger and javascript development, and hack development. Nuclide enables you to inspect elements and edit React App features in real time using Nuclide Editor-Atom while supporting functions like inline errors, auto-complete, jump-to-definitions, and others.

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Nuclide is a highly customized IDE that enables developers to improve project coding and create robust and scalable applications using essential features like working sets, health statistics, context view, debugger, and remote development. 

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Backed by a large community of developers, it also features built-in and helpful support, making it one of the top choices when selecting an IDE for React Native.

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Sublime Text

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The other React Native Developer tool on our list is Sublime, launched in 2008 as an app for Windows operating systems; it is a sophisticated text editor for code. It furnishes features like hints for codes and split and cross-platform editing support.

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It also supports custom UI toolkits for speed and an interface flexible for working on several projects and project switching.

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Sublime is one of the best text editors for React development projects, featuring various community-developed plugins that support many programming and markup languages, along with a Python API to facilitate plugins.

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The tool delivers several functionalities to developers to seamlessly build highly responsive, cross-platform mobile applications.

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Visual Studio Code

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Also known as VS Code, it's a source code editor that developers can use with languages like JavaScript, Go, Python, C++, and Fortran, providing essential support for common programming languages.

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‍VS Code features include bracket matching, syntax highlighting, and code folding, all of which can be extended by using extensions for additional themes, languages, performing code analysis, etc.

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It is an open-source React Native source code editor by Microsoft that supports Node.js, Typescript, and Javascript. Visual Studio Code offers theme customization, IntelliSense support, and built-in Git commands. It also presents debugging, error highlighting, syntax highlighting, and bracket matching.

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Expo

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Coming onto Expo is an open-source toolchain for React developers. It has its own CLI and offers easy-to-use components and APIs. It provides native APIs for Android or iOS, an SDK library, and a rich source for React components.

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It also includes a bunch of UI components that cover many use cases that aren't built into React Native core (like blur views, icons, and others).

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Expo makes it easy for Developers to build and test React Applications. With Expo, you can perform the app update in minutes without app store review processes and don't have to use any other React Native Developer tool. Other Expo features are accelerometers, real-time updates, documentation, and robust community support.

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Software engineers can employ Expo to create native applications for the web and mobile (Android and iOS) with React and JavaScript. It offers development assistance by providing a unified codebase that can run across multiple platforms while accessing APIs from cross-platform devices and publishing updates in real-time.

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It boasts various other services, including detailed documentation, community forums, and a Slack community. Expo can also work on serving, sharing, building, and publishing principles.

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ESLint

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ESLint is a popular cross-platform open-source Developer Tool for React Native that uses JSX and Javascript. It works on Node.js and has built-in plugins, transparency, and detailed documentation. It also offers to find programming errors, create your own linting rules and learn more about your source code.

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ESLint is a static code analysis tool focusing on coding style and code quality. It can quickly identify issues in JS code while providing tremendous flexibility allowing developers to specify and load tailored rules according to project conditions, making it a favored debugging tool.

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It supports the current standards of ECMAScript and the exploratory syntax that comes from upcoming prototypes while allowing the processing of JSX or TypeScript code with a transpiler or plugin.

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Flow

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Flow is a Meta-introduced programming tool launched in 2014, offering static typing annotations and making developers coding speedy, reliable, and straightforward. It provides integration, a customizable type interface, javascript, and real-time feedback.

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The most beneficial part of using Flow's static typing annotations is that you can observe faults/errors in your code.

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Flow allows developers to reduce unhelpful syntax errors with the help of its static typing annotations by discovering incompatible types before they run in the browser.

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It is a debugging tool that aids developers in coding speedily and reliably by providing a scope of features, such as a customizable type interface and JS, easier integrations, and real-time feedback.

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Jest

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Jest is a JavaScript testing tool ideal for unit testing of code. It can work for projects that use React Native, React, Node, and TypeScript, among others. Established as one of the best React Native dev tools, Jest aids developers with zero configuration and provides easy testing solutions while offering built-in code coverage reports independent of library support. It allows Snapshot testing as well to simplify the testing process.

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NativeBase

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NativeBase is a popular user interface (UI) design tool that is free to use. It can be defined as a sleek, ingenious, and utility-first component library that allows building cross-platform Android and iOS mobile applications.

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It does so by using React Native generic components. NativeBase can also help developers to take advantage of cross-platform UI components that highly impact productivity.

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Vim Editor

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Vim is a free, open-source screen-based text editor for creating and changing text efficiently. You can use it as a command-line (CLI) interface or a standalone application in a graphical user interface (GUI). It offers multi-level undo, vast plugins, and robust search and replace, and it can also integrate with many tools.

Vim Editor is a small text editing program that is powerful, fast and allows easy error detection. It is capable of being managed without menus or a mouse. Developers love it as it is a highly configurable IDE tool that will enable them to change text seamlessly.

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Reactotron

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Reactotron is a popular desktop application that works with Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is dedicatedly used for React Native tooling and offers basic tracking features to developers.

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With Reactotron, developers can maintain track of dispatch actions, application states, etc. Its valuable features include overlaying dispatch action images and real-time event tracking.

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React Navigation

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React Navigation is a React Native tool created to make a developer's life easier. Mobile apps comprise multiple screens. Managing their presentation and ensuring a smooth transition can be difficult without a navigation tool.

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To mitigate such an issue, React Navigation acts as a simple and easy solution with options for customization. It is a straightforward navigation tool that offers both tabbed navigation and standard stack navigation patterns for iOS and Android.

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Final words

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The above list has been curated to cover some of the best options available for the React Native ecosystem to reduce the dilemma of choosing the right React Native tool.

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React Native is a winning choice for most developers in building mobile applications. It is supported by plenty of React Native tools that allow them to create, debug, and navigate the React Native app.

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Every tool you use has its importance and significance. Many other tools offer similar functionality, but these are the best ones we have kept on our list because of our industry experience and thorough market research.

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We are sure you will use these React Native Developer tools in your next web app development project.

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Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any confusion or doubt about these developer tools or if you need to scale your React Native Development Services!