In this chapter, you learned that React Native is an effort by Facebook to reuse React to create native mobile applications. React and JSX are really good at declaring UI components, and since there's now a huge demand for mobile applications, it makes sense to use what you already know for the Web.

The reason there's such a demand for mobile applications over mobile browsers is that they just feel better. Web applications lack the ability to handle mobile gestures the same way apps can, and they generally don't feel like part of the mobile experience from a look and feel perspective.

React Native isn't trying to implement a component library that lets you build a single React app that runs on any mobile platform. iOS and Android are fundamentally different in many important ways. Where there's overlap, React Native does try to implement common components. Will you do away with mobile web apps now that we can build natively using React? This will probably never happen, because the user can only install so many apps.

Now that you know what React Native is and what its strengths are, you'll learn how to get started with new React Native projects in the following chapter.