wtf is react-native?

React Native lets you build real mobile apps for iOS and Android using JavaScript and React, the same approach many web developers already know. The pitch is simple: learn once, write anywhere. Instead of needing separate teams and codebases for iPhone and Android, you write your app logic once and it renders using the actual native interface components on each platform. Facebook itself uses it in production apps. At a high level, you write JavaScript code using React components, and React Native translates those into real native UI elements on the phone, not a web view pretending to be an app. The project ships with a set of ready-made components like views, scroll views, and navigators, plus APIs for animation and styling. You can also drop down into native code when you need platform-specific features, and a large community ecosystem means you can find third-party modules for things the built-in library doesn't cover. It supports Android 4.1+ and iOS 7.0+. This is aimed at developers or teams who want to ship to both major mobile platforms without maintaining two separate codebases. A startup with a small engineering team could use it to get an app on the App Store and Google Play without hiring dedicated iOS and Android specialists. A web developer who already knows React can pivot to mobile without learning Swift or Kotlin from scratch. The project's showcase page highlights real apps built with it, so you can see what's achievable. The project is actively maintained by Facebook and a large open-source community. It's under heavy, continuous development, and the README points out that keeping up with upgrades is part of working with it. The documentation is split into guides, components, and APIs, and the project encourages developers to read the source code directly for the most accurate understanding of how each piece behaves.