React Native Starter Kits Review for 2020

If you are looking to develop a native mobile application for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and even Virtual Reality headsets and helmets, you should definitely take a closer look to React Native. React Native becomes an indispensable instrument because you can “Write Once and Use Everywhere”.

It is possible since React Native utilizes Virtual DOM. It is a duplicate of a real DOM that is the standard cross-platform needed to access documents, but Virtual DOM also offers an opportunity to develop a dynamic and responsive user interface. React Native invokes the native rendering APIs: all requests from a React Native application call native components via JavaScript. So, you finally get typical UI blocks just like in iOS and Android applications.

So, put it in simple terms, the application built with React Native works on multiple platforms using native elements.

Furthermore, it’s not difficult to get started with React Native. If you look at the recent StackOverflow Survey of 2019 , we see that the React Native is in the top three Libraries, Frameworks, and Tools that wanted by the developers. This tells us that developers have a great desire to learn React Native and the community of React Native users will keep growing. The community support is a must to further improvement of any framework and it is a huge advantage of React Native.

We are the part of this community: React Native developers. We know what a great variety of toolkits, starter kits, blueprints, boilerplates, you can find on the Internet . They all are different, but may look the same, so to start let’s first describe the difference of the terms.

We go through it briefly since it’s not the topic of our article. Toolkit is just a set of tools that helps to build your app. There is no strict rules for using them — it is up to you. Blueprints is a pattern for making something: be it design or app. If you have a perfect app, make a blueprint and follow it in the future. Boilerplate or boilerplate code is a code that can be reused in any part of app without significant changes to the original. Starter kit is a set of ready-made UI components, carefully through-over design, and great project structure for the future app. It is a template for an application you can set up quickly with minimum amount of time to configure it.

In this article we are going to review the number of the best React Native starter kits to give you a fuller view of them . If you like something, follow a link in the description of the chapter and jump into the mobile development world. Enjoy reading!

React Native Starter by Flatlogic

React Native Starter is a scalable and versatile starter kit for any mobile apps. Scalability resulted from the fact that this starter kit built with a minimum amount of extra dependencies. One of the biggest dependence the kit doesn’t have is using of Expo. Expo is a framework and a platform for universal React applications and this is one of the most used. The main advantage is that it simplifies the development process, but Expo lifts a lot of restrictions and leads to big problems when you want to build a complex app and adjust the native code (Objective-C or Java). It just doesn’t allow you to do that. React native starter is Expo free.

To help you deliver stable code this kit offers unit tester with Jest and Enzyme and e2e testing with Detox. React native starter supports modular applications and includes Redux integration to manage the data. If you want to add a custom module or components you can easily do it with Plop config.

As you can see, React native starter contains everything to speed up the development process without losing the quality. Furthermore, it’s built according to the best practices of React Native: using Babel, React, Flow, and ECMAScript. This starter kit comes with 6 themes to choose from! The design of each of them is based on current market trends: it’s clean, modern, and looks harmoniously.

React Native Starter is perfect for the eCommerce applications since it provides you with easy analytics integration (GA, Firebase, etc) and has a lifetime update and support — so you will not be kicked out of the market trends because of outdated equipment. Likewise, you will find tons of Ready-to-use Components, a gallery in Instagram-style, user-profile, chat ,and calendar applications. It will take 11 minutes to read the first guide and less than an hour to make your first react native App with this starter kit.

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Gala

Gala is a premium Bootstrap React Native template. This template specializes in fast launching a mobile app. It offers 20+ screens, drawer & stack navigation, icon set, and customizable interface. The template allows customizing the whole design for all tastes and any audience. Since one of the most popular apps is the eCommerce app, this template goes along with screens for product grid Carousel, product list, and categories. The developers didn’t provide the information about last updates and support, but we know that buying this template you get one year of future updates.

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Argon React Native

Argon React native is a free React native template. It offers a rich development experience using Galio.io, React Native and Expo. You can code apps for both Android and iOS with this template. Argon’s Design System was created by this team and was applied in other products including Argon React native. It consists of different shades of blue and purple colors and based on using gradient between them. The starter kit goes with fully coded components and examples screens to fast start your app. All components come with the description and usage examples. This is a new template that was released half a year ago; the last update was 3 months ago.

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Material Kit React Native

This template as you can understand from the name was inspired by Material Design and was built according to the best Google practices. It features over 200 variations components like buttons, inputs, navigations, etc. The components were restyled from Galio.io to make it resemble Material Design. Also, the toolkit provides us with a huge number of pre-built screens like chat, cart, search, profile. To help you quickly start your app developers used Expo in this toolkit. That’s fine when you face impending deadlines to launch a project, but if someday you decide to improve your product and make it more complicated, you will meet the limitations in utilizing Expo.

You can use only its SDK and packages written in JavaScript and can’t add native modules written in Objective-C, Swift, or Java. Material Kit React Native was released at the beginning of 2019, the last update was in November. The team of developers offers you free updates and premium support for the first 6 months after buying this toolkit.

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Ignite

Ignite CLI is an open-source project with quite big popularity on GitHub. The project is alive (the first release was 4 years ago or more), constantly updated (some updates were last month), and has a large number of developers who are interested in this product. Some things in our world are created by very devoted people. The result of this devotion is a high-quality and thoughtful product, and this starter kit is an example. It is a developer tool only, not a library, so Ignite has no runtime and has a list of plugins and boilerplates at your disposal. Thanks to generating command you can easily generate components, screen, etc., or modify the template. Likewise, it offers the opportunity to create plugins, boilerplates, and generators.

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Pepperoni

Pepperoni is a delicious starter kit for mobile development. The developers are programmers that built real-world applications and came to a point where they started to create their own patterns, tools, and development practices. When using Pepperoni you get up-to-date React Native scaffolding with a modular and well-documented structure for application code. It built with Redux and ImmutableJS. Pepperoni gives you all instruments to focus on features for your app, instead of building an app from scratch. This template can help you quickly launch React Native application without putting a lot of money and time into it.

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React Native Starter by ueno

This is a starter kit built by Ueno, a full-service agency building digital products. Since it’s a very opinionated product, this toolkit locks you into developers’ way of doing things. Developers used several extra-dependencies like React Navigation 3, TypeScript 3, Cocoapods, Gradle 4. The design is bright, simple, and minimalistic. The developers provide support via GitHub issues but have no big plans to upgrade the product. It’s an open-source project, so if you want to build your app on top of this Starter Kit you just need to clone or download the repository.

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