Is it Possible to Implement Beautiful UI using React Native Elements?

Our team has been using this framework for quite a while now and we were able to satisfy all UI requests from our clients using React Native UI Kits (or offer a decent alternative). So, in this article, we’ll talk about the tools that we’re using to create unique UI elements, share some tricks on how to add сustom elements that aren’t initially supported by React Native, and share some UI projects that Stormotion has developed over the years.

🧰 Tools to Create an Engaging UI using React Native

To begin with, let’s talk about what tools you can use to implement static UI elements into a React Native application. One of the most popular ones are:

Apart from static components, simple as well as complex components with animations can significantly improve user engagement. React Native has an in-built library for implementing animations — React Native Animated. The biggest problem with it is that it doesn’t allow developers to conveniently set the communication between the native thread (where animations are created) and JavaScript thread (where the logic of the app gets set up).

To be more specific, if you need to know an animation’s state (let’s say how far a user scrolled down) in the JS thread, React Native Animated library significantly limits the opportunities because of the lack of convenience in threads connection.

Luckily, there’s a much better option for implementing animations in React Native, which is called React Native Reanimated. We won’t go into technical details, but it’s generally one of the best solutions on the market that allows developers to create practically anything (surely, with enough expertise and critical thinking).

William Candillon is a developer and a YouTuber who has a whole series on creating stunning animations in React Native. Here’s the playlist.

📲 How to Add Fully Customizable Components in React Native

In case out-of-the-box libraries don’t have UI components you find suitable for your application, or maybe you’d like to have the logo of your business somewhere in the app, React Native allows adding customly created elements and customizable icons.

For that matter, one of the main tools in web and mobile app development is React-Native-SVG. With this library, you can create numerous static UI components. To animate them in your React Native app, you can simply use the Reanimated library from the previous section.

All these animations were created using React-Native-Reanimated. Additionally, we used Adobe for the fireworks that arise when swiping left. Then, we used React-Native-Lottie and implemented it in the Asha app without any issues.

💡 Takeaways

In this article, we’ve talked about several tools to build engaging UI design and shown multiple real-life examples of how it can be done. Hopefully, we were able to break the stereotype that React Native isn’t the right tool for UI.

If you have any questions left or need any help with designing your app, feel free to reach out. We’d be happy to help you!