Top 7 React Native Apps: Defining Benchmark for Mobile Innovation

React Native has recently become a popular JavaScript framework for developing cross-platform mobile apps, as it enables the efficient building of powerful apps without compromising performance. In our day-to-day lives, we use many apps that are based on this JavaScript platform.

React Native has proper support from Meta, and you get access to the open-source community, which helps mobile app developers create responsive, fast, and profitable apps for Android and iOS devices.

In this article, we are going to explore the apps built on React Native, and we will also explain how you can integrate in-app purchases (IAP) into your own React Native app to monetize your project.

Quick Overview

As we already know, mobile app development has been evolving, and developers have been actively integrating React Native into their app development workflows, as it offers better cross-platform compatibility. Let’s quickly look at some of the most popular mobile apps built on React Native that we use daily.

Facebook: Since Meta is the creator of React Native, Facebook naturally uses it extensively within its own apps, including parts of the main Facebook app.
Instagram: It is one of the most popular platforms within the Meta family. Instagram has integrated React Native into its existing native iOS and Android apps. They have significantly improved the rate of development and now share a large percentage of code between iOS and Android.
Facebook Ads Manager: This was the first fully cross-platform React Native app developed by Facebook. It handles logic related to ad formats, time zones, and currencies, benefiting from JavaScript’s existing codebase.
Walmart: A retail giant adopted React Native to offer its users an enhanced mobile shopping experience. Walmart leveraged React Native to deliver a faster and smoother user experience, aiming to improve performance, accelerate time to market, and provide a consistent, native-like feel across both Android and iOS apps.
Discord: A communication app popular among gamers and communities, it utilizes React Native to offer a high-quality mobile experience. Discord shares a significant percentage of its codebase between Android and iOS, facilitating efficient development.
Wix: A website creation platform highly popular among users throughout the world, Wix uses React Native for its mobile app. They were among the early adopters of the framework.
Skype: Microsoft revamped its Skype app in 2017 and rebuilt it with React Native. This helped them develop an entirely new app with a refreshed design while adding new features, not only for mobile but also for the Windows desktop apps.

1. Instagram

Instagram is one of Meta’s flagship apps, known for its visual social media platform. It has been one of the first to leverage React Native and integrate it into their existing app, specifically for messaging and push notifications, which was seamlessly implemented as a WebView, offering impressive performance and quick feature deployment.

Since the entire UI was simple, the developers didn’t have to develop a complex navigation infrastructure. Currently, the push notification feature has become an essential part of mobile devices, as users continue to use the app and receive notifications for all their activities, including likes, comments, and direct messages.

Why It’s a Top App and How React Native Integration Helped

Userbase: Billions of active users from around the world.
Architecture: The architecture is high-performance.
Consistent: Cross-platform consistency across Android and iOS.
Code Reusability: Reduced development time and efforts as the code stays consistent between Android and iOS.

2. Shopify Mobile

In 2020, Shopify began migrating its native mobile app to React Native, leveraging the features and simplicity it had been offering. Their development team had to write the code once for Android and once for iOS, while enabling the team to work across all platforms, including mobile and the web, and helped enhance productivity.

The implementation of React Native helped the development team unlock new opportunities, as they now have more time to focus on their growth. Additionally, in terms of performance, the app has become blazing fast and highly stable.

Why It’s a Top App and How React Native Integration Helped

Userbase: Widely used by online retailers.
Timely Updates: Supports real-time, consistent updates and notifications regardless of the platform.
Usability: Offers smooth UX/UI across multiple platforms, including Android, iOS, and the Web.
Seamless Experience: Enables merchants to manage stores with better security and timely reports easily.

3. Tesla

Tesla utilizes a combination of React Native and Godot Engine for their car companion app, which enables them to provide users with consistent functionality without compromising on appearance, while maintaining a seamless user experience. Users of the app can personalize their climate settings, monitor battery levels, track their location, and remotely lock or unlock the vehicle.

Since React Native is so powerful that it offers developers the freedom to build apps for multiple platforms without requiring them to hire additional developers for two separate platforms, this helps them allocate a limited budget and lower development costs.

Why It’s a Top App and How React Native Integration Helped

Reliability: Offers higher reliability while keeping the latency low as the dev team used native bridges to help improve communication between React Native and the Godot engine.
Efficient Controls: Real-time vehicle data integration that helps in reliably controlling the features of the vehicle.
Consistency: The interface, usability, and functionality stay consistent on both Android and iOS devices.
User Experience: Cross-platform experience is designed to enhance user satisfaction and improve engagement.

4. Pinterest

Pinterest is known as a visual search engine where users can discover ideas and inspiration from almost any category. Since the entire platform is based on images and videos, users are looking for quick loading times and smooth scrolling.

The developers at Pinterest found that implementing features with React Native is actually faster and more efficient, as the UI code is fully identical across both mobile operating systems. This helped the brand improve development speed while reducing overhead.

Why It’s a Top App and How React Native Integration Helped

Userbase: The overall user interface and the platform are completely based on the images.
In-App Elements: There is a heavy usage of animations and transitions.
Streamlined Development: The cross-platform delivery ensures an efficient experience, as the features and UI code remain consistent across Android and iOS.
Performance Enhancements: The team can focus on designing a responsive and fast app experience while maintaining battery efficiency.

5. Discord

Discord for Android and iOS has undergone a major overhaul and received performance updates by shifting to React Native, which has streamlined the development process and significantly improved the mobile experience, providing users with a consistent experience across both major mobile platforms. This helps the development team maintain consistency between the mobile and desktop experiences.

With the implementation of React Native, the chat interface has been completely handled through JavaScript. Moreover, users will be able to experience seamless video, voice, and text-based chat.

Why It’s a Top App and How React Native Integration Helped

Userbase: Focuses on real-time communication and is popular among online communities and gamers.
Consistent User Experience: The app is responsive and offers consistent updates as iterations are released more frequently across platforms.
Small Dev Team: The majority of the code remains the same, and it is shared between Android and iOS, enabling the company to maintain the app efficiently even with a small team.
Over-the-Air Updates: OTA support is available, enabling the team to release updates on time without requiring prior approval.

6. Coinbase

Coinbase is recognized as one of the world’s largest and most trusted cryptocurrency exchanges, serving as a go-to platform for millions of users globally to securely buy, trade, and sell a wide range of cryptocurrencies.

The app provides a user-friendly interface and experience for crypto wallets and trading, making it suitable for both beginners and experts. There is also an advanced trading tool, designed for experienced users who are well-versed in the crypto world. The moment they transformed to React Native, the whole app became stable and secure than it had ever been before.

Why It’s a Top App and How React Native Integration Helped

Userbase: Used by crypto traders, buyers, and sellers globally.
Security: Offers enhanced financial-grade security to ensure transactions and accounts are secure.
Brownfield Approach: The development team has implemented the brownfield approach, which helps them transition existing functionalities and features from native to React Native.
Consistent UI and UX: Provides an excellent user interface and user experience for both beginners and skilled users.

7. Bloomberg

Bloomberg is a leading provider of news, analytics, and data related to finance. Since this information is crucial, their mobile app must operate in perfect condition while continuing to deliver accurate and real-time information to the target audience.

Being built with React Native ensures its better reliability and enhanced performance across multiple platforms. For users, they receive timely updates that provide a consistent experience.

Why It’s a Top App and How React Native Integration Helped

Userbase: It is targeted at people seeking financial news, offering real-time news and stock tracking options.
Enhanced UI: The overall UI has been enhanced, offering custom animations and native modules to provide users with a consistent experience.
Simplified Development: The development process has been simplified, allowing developers to redesign their app while maintaining a consistent codebase.

Integrating In-App Purchases in React Native

React Native supports in-app purchases (IAP), and it can be easily integrated into your app through the react-native-iap libraries to monetize your mobile app. Here, we have outlined quick steps. If you are looking for an in-depth guide to integrate IAP purchases, you can check out this detailed tutorial on React Native in-app purchases.

Step-by-Step Integration Guide

1. Run this code to install the in-app purchases (IAP) package.

npm install react-native-iap

2. Link Native Modules (for older versions) with this code:

npx pod-install

3. Configure Products in App Store / Play Store.
(Define your IAP products in Google Play Console or Apple App Store Connect.)

4. Request and Display Products using the following code:

import * as RNIap from ‘react-native-iap’; const itemSkus = [‘product_id_1’, ‘product_id_2’]; async function fetchProducts() { const products = await RNIap.getProducts(itemSkus); setAvailableProducts(products); }

5. The following code will allow you to handle purchases:

RNIap.purchaseUpdatedListener(purchase => { // Validate and process the purchase });

RNIap.purchaseErrorListener(error => { // Handle errors });

6. If you are looking for a code to restore purchases, then you can use the following:

await RNIap.restorePurchases();

Concluding Thoughts

React Native continues to dominate mobile app development in the current year, as this JavaScript framework has been offering Fortune 500 companies and startups a scalable and efficient way to deliver mobile apps across platforms.

Companies that are developing social media apps for tech giants, providing platforms for crypto wallets and food delivery apps, have found that most of these top tech brands have started to rely solely on React Native, as it offers not just shared codebases but also performance and speed.

With the right tools and proper documentation readily available for guidance, there has never been a better time to either launch your app or transform any existing native app to React Native, which will help grow your business by targeting mobile users.

When it comes to monetization, you can simplify the whole process by considering the usage of Adapty’s React Native SDK, which will help you with powerful and flexible in-app purchase management.

There has never been a better time to launch your own React Native based mobile app and grow your business.