Facebook — if you’d remember — had developed React Native to help developer take React, a framework that allows developers to build single-page apps the company developed in-house, and enable them to create Android and iOS apps. The social giant had a lot of exciting news to share about this service at today’s F8.
The social giant open-sourced React Native’s codebase at F8 last year. Ever since, the service has seen massive adoption and very good support worldwide. Facebook says more than 600 people have committed code to the service and more than 250,000 developers currently have React tools installed. Other numbers the company shared say that the service has been used by more than 500 companies and developers to publish apps to Apple’s app store and more than 200 companies and developers to publish apps on Google’s Play store.
Following the success story of its service, Facebook announced that Microsoft and Samsung have both signed up to back React Native. Apparently, Microsoft will soon be allowing developers to create Universal Windows Apps for Windows 10 using React Native. This means that the developer bandwidth will now extend from Android and iOS to Windows, too.
On the other hand, Samsung’s Tizen which is used as an operating system in TVs, wearables and other devices will also support React Native.
The social giant also announced that it is bringing the Facebook SDK to React Native which will allow developers to easily bring standard Facebook features like Sharing, App Analytics and Facebook’s Graph API to their apps.
