How to Integrate React Native with an Existing Android and IOS Apps: 8 Efficient Steps

Are you wondering how to integrate React Native with an existing app? If yes, we are here to help. 

It’s true that the process of integrating React Native involves initial complexities, but if dealt with properly with the right expertise, it can save time and cost. And absolutely transform your app development ecosystem.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the benefits of React Native integration, the steps to integrate React Native with your existing iOS or Android app and help you choose a reliable team to assist you in the journey.  Let’s begin.

• Top 4 Reasons Why to Integrate Your Existing App with React Native
• What Are the Possible Drawbacks during the React Native Integration with Existing Apps
• 8 Steps on How to Integrate React Native with an Existing App
• Choosing a Reliable Team of Professionals for Integrating React Native with an Existing App
• Final Thoughts

Top 4 Reasons Why to Integrate Your Existing App with React Native

Before delving deeper, let me take you through some of the advantages of integrating React Native into an existing Android app or iOS app.

1. Saves Cost

Building native apps is a costly affair. Whether you want to build a mobile app for an Android audience or the iOS market, integration of React Native enables you to reduce the app-building cost significantly. There’s no need to hire two teams for Android and iOS separately for native apps. Instead, with a small team, you can deliver mission-critical mobile apps at a very low budget. Also having to maintain a single app code base reduces app maintenance costs.

2. Code Reusability

React Native makes it easier to reuse the codebase to build Android & iOS apps. It is expected that as much as 90% of the codebase can be reused if you incorporate React Native in the existing Android or iOS apps.

Also, since React Native is an open-source framework, pre-developed components, and shared codebases are easily available. This accelerates the speed of your app development and reduces costs noticeably.

3. High Stability

Although relatively new, the React Native framework is highly stable as it is supported by Facebook & a huge open source community. Due to this reason, renowned brands, such as Instagram, Tesla, Airbnb, Bloomberg, Facebook, Walmart, SoundCloud Pulse, and Uber have adopted the framework to accelerate their app performance and enhance customer experience.

4. Faster Time to Market

Integrate a React Native module into an existing app and experience a substantial improvement in your time to market. This is because a single codebase enables faster testing, faster bug fixing, and hence ensures quicker development and delivery of apps compared to the native approach.

In addition to these, capabilities such as hot reloading, live reload, 3rd party plug-in support, and easy personalization, are some of the key reasons for which you should mull over integrating the React Native app to iOS app or Android app.

For more read our blog on the advantages of React Native

What Are the Possible Drawbacks during the React Native Integration with Existing Apps

Even though the merits outweigh the demerits, a few concerns about integrating react-native into existing iOS app or Android apps are:

1. The Requirement of Bridging Code

In integration, you will face most of the issues in the ‘bridging’ process. For React Native to wire into Native UI components, JavaScript bridge is used, writing which might be challenging. Moreover, the same also has to be updated regularly for seamless functioning.

2. Build Issue

Another huge challenge is that incorporating React Native means a regular update to the build processes for each app. If you use CircleCI to build the projects, then you’ve to reconfigure it to support the React Native build steps.

8 Steps on How to Integrate React Native with an Existing App

Now that you know the pros & cons of integration, let us look at the steps to convert an Android Java app to React Native and also to integrate the React Native feature in an iOS native app.

Prerequisites

Note that there are some prerequisites to the integration process. 

• React Native development environment – NodeJS, CLI, etc.
• Android development environment– Android Studio, Java Development Kit, etc.
• iOS development environment – Xcode, CocoaPods, etc.

The following are the steps:

Step 1: Create Directory Structure

Organize your existing app to align with the folder architecture of a react-native project. This will enable you to use the React Native CLI. Do the following to structure the app:

Would you like to keep the VCS history in your native app? If yes, create the sub-module for the folder iOS and Android each.

Step 2: Install JS Dependencies

• Navigate to the root directory and create a new package.json file comprising the following contents:

NOTE: Ensure the yarn Native package manager has been installed.

Next, the React Native packages have to be installed. Open a terminal, locate the directory with your package.json file, and run:

• This may print the following message:

warning “react-native@0.52.2” has unmet peer dependency “react@16.2.0”.

• This implies that you need to install React

• The new /node_modules folder created by Yarn will store all the JavaScript dependencies. 
• Finally, add node_modules/ to your .gitignore file.

Step 3: Update the Native Code

Now you have to update the current native code. Since React Native originated from Facebook, following the installation of React Native, there could be duplicate dependencies with other Facebook libraries.

So, eliminate some parts of the dependencies:

Step 4: Leverage the Power of Bridges

The next step is to create powerful bridges to exchange data between the native code and the JavaScript code. React Native modules have to be created to achieve this objective. 

While calling a native method from React Native, keep in mind that the javascript and the native code run in distinct threads. This implies that you’ll not be able to interact with the displayed native elements directly from a bridge process.

In order to deal with the thread-related issues on iOS, dispatch_async functionality should be used:

Step 5: New Reactive-Native Module Registration

It is recommended to adopt a manual approach to install an external native module for React Native. For Android, add the .addPackage(new MyLib()) call wherever you’ve included React Native content. And with the ReactInstanceManager, use a plug-in.

Step 6: Bundle Your Assets

You can create the bundled assets using the same command as the javascript.

• Send the output to /src/main/res/ in Android.
• In iOS, you’ve to move the bundler output to the same folder as the javascript on xCode.

Step 7: Add React-Native Content

By using the AppRegistry, you can seamlessly add React Native content in several places.

Do the following in the JS:

For Android:

For iOS:

Step 8: Test the Integration

Since the basic process of integrating React Native with your existing app has been executed, you’ve to test the integration now. 

• Start the Metro bundler to build the index. bundle package 
• Start the server on localhost to serve it

Next, you’ve to add the App Transport Security exception. Run the packager, and then run the app to verify whether everything has been executed properly or not. 

Choosing a Reliable Team of Professionals for Integrating React Native with an Existing App

React Native integration is a complex process. It calls for expertise in the OS, programming languages, and scripts as well as sound knowledge of emulators, frameworks, and connecting components to execute the process successfully.

If you do not have the required knowledge, skills, and experience, it’s always wise to choose a reliable team of professionals to integrate the React Native application into an iOS and an Android app.

TechExactly mobile app development team is extremely experienced and consists of all the necessary skill sets to help you in the React Native integration process. Working with this vibrant team not only ensures an easy and seamless integration experience in the most cost-effective & timely manner, but its reliable support team is also available round the clock for any assistance, whenever required.

Final Thoughts

Considering all of the above, we conclude that even though React Native is a relatively newer technology to build apps on, it is fast gaining popularity for app development across multiple mobile platforms because of its simplicity which saves time, money, and resources.

Also, due to its fantastic features such as support for third-party plugins, shared codebase, large developer community, and the ability to deliver more stable apps, React Native has become an obvious choice for businesses these days.

Integrating React-Native with an existing app is a smart move to reduce your mobile app development cost, improve speed, and address changing customer needs in the shortest time frame.

So, does your app migration need expert advice? 

Techexactly is an award-winning mobile app development company that enables businesses to solve complex business challenges by leveraging mobility solutions. We have a very strong mobile app development team consisting of experienced engineers and certified project managers who can assist you in every step of integrating React Native with the existing apps.