React Native is fast becoming one of the powerful hybrid application development frameworks. Also since it helps the developer run native functions to do heavy operations, it’s quite customizable and controllable.
The community has came up with a lot of great plugins for React Native projects that solves a wide variety use cases. This article sums up a few of them that I’ve used in our projects.
Routing
I’m sure that almost 99% of the applications are built with more than two screens - here routing is the one major thing that the application developer should take care of. This is one plugin I personally suggest for your React Native project. It’s very easy to setup and manage as well.
Maps
Are you building a map based application? Are you building a clone of Uber? Here is the right plugin for you. This Airbnb’s plugin gives you Google/Apple map component for your application and also provides a lot of options to customize it’s base on your use case.
Illustrated Animations
When you’re building a fancy application and looking to have some gorgeous illustrated animations you should end up using Lottie - it’s another popular React Native plugin given by Airbnb. It can render the After Effects animation with the corresponding animation’s JSON format.
Snack Bar
If you’re building an application in which you want to show a lot of status and alert messages you need a way to show the data in a beautiful manner. This plugin helps you render the messages in snack bars where you’ll get a tiny bar in the bottom of the page with the message.
Date Picker
One of the important elements in a lot of applications is the date picker, without which managing the user inputted date is a really hectic job. Here is the plugin for RN that provides native date picker in both Android and iOS. It’s way powerful and flexible compared to Native’s DatePickerAndroid and DatePickerIOS
Element Animations
Apart from animated illustrations, the other way to make the app more fancy and fun is to add transition animations to the element. The plugin comes with multiple options which are similar to jQuery’s transitions.
Camera
Building an app without a photo capture option is very rare currently. Cameras are used in various scenarios like capturing a picture, videos, bar codes, QR codes, etc. Does your application fit in any one on this list? Then, don’t give this plugin a miss. This plugin supports a lot of bar code formats as well.
Image Picker
If your application has support to send pictures from your gallery or capture and send, you can use this plugin. It integrates with the native library and works seamlessly. Few options include geo tagging, rotation, resolution settings, etc.
Canvas
If you’re looking for a plugin to integrate signature entries for your application, this plugin is the one you’ll end up with. Doesn’t come with too many options but does the job that it’s intended to do.