Scaling React Native Apps with Mobile Micro Frontends and Portals

React Native is one of the most popular open source development frameworks on the market. Companies around the world rely on it to develop cross-platform mobile applications for iOS and Android.

However, even with cross-platform capabilities, React Native teams aren’t able to ship applications fast enough. Engineers have a hard time scaling apps, development teams find it difficult to achieve parity between web and mobile, and all of this trickles down to disappointed customers and frustrated stakeholders.

This is where React Native mobile micro frontends and Portals can help.

Common challenges with scaling React Native apps

Some hiccups that React Native teams experience include: 

Limited skill reuse between React and React Native. In order to make the same React UI functionality work, developers have to learn new React Native APIs.

Bringing existing web features requires rework. Instead of spending time creating new functionality, teams are stuck rebuilding features that already work within their web application.

Enter Portals for React Native and micro frontends

Ionic recently released Portals for React Native—a product that leverages a micro frontend architecture to create modular, feature-specific web experiences that can be used within React Native apps.

Portals and micro frontends explained 

Micro frontends break up mobile apps into self-contained feature slices. Each of these slices can be fully owned by a single team and allows them to work end-to-end on that single feature. This means that users get a cohesive experience while development teams maintain their focus. 

If your organization is considering a micro frontend organizational structure to ship features faster, Portals gives you a plug-and-play experience. Some of the key benefits you can realize immediately include:

Reuse between web and native teams. 

Architects can leverage their React Native team to continue building enterprise-grade applications while allowing other web engineering teams to contribute to the same application. Empower your team to create apps at scale by developing and integrating custom web features into a React Native app without needing to rewrite it. 

No need to rebuild existing features for mobile. 

Portals gives React Native developers access to a variety of solutions for security, such as authentication, biometrics, and secure data storage. There’s even a full library of plugins available to tap into native device features including geolocation and camera. 

Achieve roadmap parity by shipping features faster. 

When the React Native application is ready to be published, Portals works seamlessly with Ionic’s DevOps infrastructure to manage user permissions, feature versions, and more. Together, React Native development teams can harness the full power of mobile CI/CD and the added benefit of Live Updates—a tool used to publish updates and changes made to the web code in a Portal immediately, without worrying about sending it to the app store for approval.

We’re here to help

With Portals for React Native, teams can continue leveraging the React Native community for help while gaining an additional level of support from Ionic. Our world-class support and advisory services can help your team get the most out of Portals.

Get started with Portals

React Native, while robust, has its drawbacks. Adopting a micro frontend architecture using Ionic Portals will empower your team to build and scale high quality mobile apps quickly. Try Portals today or speak to a Portals specialist to get started.

About Ionic

Ionic is a leader in enterprise mobile app development, with 5 million developers worldwide and thousands of enterprise customers who use Ionic to build mission-critical apps for their customers, both external and internal. It powers 15% of apps in the app store, not including thousands of apps built internally at enterprises for every line-of-business need. Ionic is unique in that it takes a web-first approach, leveraging HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build high-quality iOS, Android, desktop, and Progressive Web Apps.