Relaxation Breathing App
Several years ago, I was tasked with creating a simple relaxation breathing app so a counselor’s clients could practice at home. At the time, I was using Corona SDK for some game projects, so I whipped the relaxation breathing app together pretty quickly. While this app is not available for download, I decided it would make a very useful demo for learning the React Native framework for building cross-platform apps in JavaScript.
Screenshots
Lessons Learned from React Native
It is very easy to get started with React Native if you’re familiar with JavaScript already (and even more so if you’ve worked with React for a web project already). If you’re only going to make apps on occasion and you’re already using JavaScript regularly, this is an easy way to stand up a new project quickly.
There are definitely some drawbacks, however. I found the documentation to be frustrating relative to other frameworks like Flutter. While there were many available demos, I found it hard to track down details whenever I wanted to do something different from the demos. The stack navigator from React Native 4 was poorly documented – especially how it differed in Native versus the web. I did eventually work out all the kinks and get it working quite nicely.
The overall development process was greatly simplified by using a managed Expo project. It allows live updating of code and greatly simplifies the build experience. Luckily, everything I needed (including the audio-visual components for the guided relaxation audio file) was already included in Expo. Leaving the managed Expo ecosystem requires a bit of work, so I’m glad I didn’t have to go there for this project.
Since I spend a lot of time in the world of web development, the flex layout and CSS-inspired styling options seemed very natural. If you ever get frustrated with the layout options of other mobile frameworks, this one is about as easy as I’ve ever experienced.