In this article we are going to take a look at how to compress videos in React Native as well as general media, such as photos or audio content. It’s standard practice to compress the full size of raw images/videos before they are sent to be stored on the server in order to conserve storage cost, but most importantly to improve the user experience by an order of magnitude.

Using React Native you can build a variety of app screens that are cross-platform using JavaScript as the main programming language. One such app screen feature is uploading photos which is quite a common feature in social media apps. Uploading photos to Firebase Storage is a common practice in React Native apps that have backend integration with Firebase, such as our React Native templates.

In today’s article we will build a React Native Music Player, to showcase how easy it is to build a music app in React Native, that is optimized for both native iOS and Android. The project we are going to build will look and behave similar to the Spotify player, that all of us are familiar with. The main goal is to have a basic app with two screens: one with a list of predefined songs and another one with the actual music player.

In React Native WebViews enable access to any web portal in the mobile app itself. In other words, a web view allows us to open the web URLs inside the app interface. While React Native provides us with a built-it web view component, but we are going to use react-native-webview plugin in this tutorial, since it is more powerful. React Native WebView is a modern, well-supported, and cross-platform WebView for React Native.

You might have seen Google Maps in almost all the apps these days. Some mobile apps are displaying their outlet locations, track users (like Uber), showing nearby places, etc. So, it shows the importance of maps support in mobile apps. Today, we are going to integrate Google Maps in a React Native app step by step, using the popular React Native Maps package.

React Native has gained a lot of popularity among mobile app developers within the last few years, and the tooling ecosystem has improved a lot as a result. In this article, we are listing the best React Native development tools that are indispensable to any React Native developer who wants to be as productive as possible in their development and debugging processes.

The Async Storage is a simple key-value pair based storage system in React Native. It is used for scenarios where you want to save the user’s data on the device itself instead of using any cloud service, such as building offline apps. According to the React Native’s official documentation:

On iOS, AsyncStorage is backed by native code that stores small values in a serialized dictionary and larger values in separate files. On Android, AsyncStorage will use either RocksDB or SQLite based on what is available.

In this tutorial, we are taking a look at how to detect and support dark mode in React Native apps. You are going to build a small demo app that sets its appearance based on the platform OS. The platform OS will have two theme modes, dark or light. By default, when the app will start, it is going to have the theme based on the platform OS but the user is going have an option to toggle between the themes.

In this tutorial, we are going to give a quick introduction to React Native hooks. Hooks in React are available since the version 16.7.0-alpha. These functions allow us to use React state and a component’s lifecycle methods in a functional component. If you are familiar with React, you know that the functional component has been called as a functional stateless component. Not any more.

In this article, we are going to discuss the in and outs of the React Native App Icon for both iOS and Android. The app icon is a critical component of a mobile app since it’s always exposed to users. A great app icon can improve your app install numbers and can boost daily active users if it’s attractively designed. Anyone who is building a React Native app will eventually need to solve the issue of adding a React Native app icon to their mobile apps, prior to publishing them to the app stores.