Top React Native Libraries for Building Powerful Mobile Apps

React Native for years has been the go-to solution for cross platform app development until Flutter arrived. Keeping aside all the buzz around React Native vs Flutter aside, the former is still the most preferred library for many developers around the world.

The popularity of React Native app development primarily can be ascribed to its modular component-based architecture and ease of reusing code while maintaining native user experience. This bridging of the gap between native and cross-platform development is possible because of the extensive third-party and official libraries that it offers.

Whether you need a good library for user interface or navigation or forms or animations or even AR/VR experiences, React Native has made you covered from all directions. As an app developer you have a React Native library for each and everything.

Here we are going to provide a shortlist of some of the most sought-after React Native libraries along with their strengths and features. Let’s start.

NativeBase

NativeBase library is open-source and free for developers. But for certain themes with value added features you need to pay a premium. The best thing is, this library can be used for your web projects as well. If you want a powerful templating engine to shape the user interface of your React Native app, you can rely on this library.

Key Features & Strengths

• Huge user base and proactive community support
• It has a 18.4K stars on GitHub.
• The app UI can be personalized and tweaked to domain-specific requirements easily with templates while using the same codebase.
• It is compatible with Utility Props that further allows you to develop custom components and UI elements for the app project.

React Native Elements

When you need a library enriched with customisable elements for your app project, this library comes handy and useful. It provides a rich set of customisable elements allowing you to tweak them as per the UI/UX requirements of the app. It offers a large repository of elements for almost every UI element ranging from forms to sliders to grids buttons, icons and many more.

Key Features & Strengths

• It offers UI elements that offer consistent look, feel and interactivity across both iOS and Android.
• The library is updated on a continuous basis and brings advanced features and latest design attributes frequently for the developers.
• It is extremely popular with a huge community support and enjoys 23.5k star ratings on GitHub.

React Native Paper

Paper is the most popular open-source library to allow React Native app development services to maintain Google Material design protocols in the user interface. Allowing easy and modular iterations for shaping the user experience on the mobile and web is another key strength of this library.

Key Features & Strengths

• It is extremely popular, widely used and has 9.8k stars on GitHub.
• It offers support for almost all major UI components that developers require including user interface logic, animations, accessibility and many more.
• It allows customisation around several elements including hues, dark or light modes and several others.

React Native UI Kitten

React Native UI Kitten is a popular open-source library known for its extensive and customizable theme and icon repository. It provides developers with over 480 icons to choose from, allowing for a wide range of options to enhance the visual appeal of their apps.

Key Features & Strengths

• Over 480 icons available for enhancing app visuals.
• Customizable themes, with support for creating personalized themes
• More than 20 essential UI components for building user interfaces.
• Detailed documentation and live examples for easy implementation.

Lottie

Lottie is a powerful tool that allows developers to add high-quality animations to their React Native apps with ease. By utilising JSON files exported from Adobe After Effects, developers can create lightweight and scalable vector animations.

Key Features & Strengths

• Easy integration of high-quality animations into React Native apps.
• Lightweight and scalable vector animations using JSON files.
• Simplified creation of complex animations without extensive coding.
• Maintains performance and efficiency in the app.

React Native Navigation

React Native Navigation is a popular library that assists developers in creating intuitive and user-friendly navigation within their React Native apps. It offers a variety of built-in navigators, including stack, tab, drawer, and modal navigators, making it easy to build different navigation structures.

Key Features & Strengths

• Variety of built-in navigators for different navigation structures.
• Highly customizable navigation bars, tabs, and UI components.
• Optimized for smooth transitions and animations, enhancing user experience.
• Easy integration with other libraries and tools.

Jest

Jest, created by Facebook, is a versatile unit testing framework specifically designed for mobile applications. It allows developers of a React Native app development company to test JavaScript code and can be adapted to any JS framework or library.

Read More: Flutter vs React Native vs Xamarin vs Ionic

Key Features & Strengths

• Snapshot testing support for efficient testing cycles.
• CLI tool for controlling app testing.
• Comprehensive documentation with examples.
• Robust and supportive community.

Mocha

Mocha is a JavaScript framework used for running asynchronous app testing. It executes tests on both Node.js and browsers, providing in-browser support and running tests in series.

Key Features & Strengths

• In-browser support and series-based test execution.
• Maturity with highlighted areas that require attention.
• Uses JavaScript API for conducting tests.

Redux Form

Redux Form is a powerful library that simplifies form state management, specifically field values, within Redux. It provides a concise integration of the state container into applications, allowing developers to create reusable input components for form fields.

Key Features & Strengths

• Easy integration and reuse of input components for form fields.
• Support for different validations in various form-filling scenarios.
• Ideal for managing complex forms.

ViroReact

ViroReact is an open-source, cross-platform framework for building AR and VR apps using React Native. It offers support for all mobile AR and VR platforms, allowing developers to create immersive experiences.

Key Features & Strengths

• Supports all mobile AR and VR platforms.
• Uses a single codebase for streamlined development.

Ending Notes

React Native and its ecosystem of libraries and tools provide developers with a powerful toolkit for building versatile and engaging mobile applications. You have literally everything at your disposal. But making the final choice depends on the nature of your intended product.

Written by Chirag Manavar

Chirag Manavar is a Full Stack Developer and DevOps expert at EncodeDots, specializing in scalable applications, cloud infrastructure, and automation. Proficient in JIRA, Git, and CI/CD pipelines, he streamlines development workflows for seamless delivery. Passionate about innovation, Chirag stays ahead of industry trends to enhance user experiences, optimize system performance, and drive digital transformation.