Introducing Portals for React Native

We’re excited to announce the release of Portals for React Native. Development teams can now use Ionic Portals to scale and move faster by inserting web content into React Native mobile applications. Portals leverages a micro frontend architecture to create modular, feature-specific micro experiences that can be reused from React to React Native apps.

React Native challenges

React Native is one of the most popular alternatives for building cross-platform mobile apps. Many teams select React Native because their current web application is built with React. However, as projects scale, development teams quickly run into problems, including:

• Limited code reuse between React and React Native. In order to make the same UI functionality work with React Native, developers will have to learn new APIs.
• Time spent bringing existing web features to mobile. Instead of spending time creating new features, teams are stuck rebuilding features that already work with their web application.
• Mobile roadmaps that lag behind the web team. Because new features for web and mobile are built and deployed on separate roadmaps, and mobile takes longer to build features, the mobile team tends to move slower than the web team.

The complications multiply when trying to build a do-it-yourself solution.

It can be argued that a do-it-yourself approach is suitable for building out this web and native collaboration capability. But, as with many DIY projects, problems can come up:

• Maintenance and coordination. Manually coordinating React Native releases with web code releases can be a cumbersome process and lead to team miscommunication.
• Time consuming, costly to maintain. Teams spend more time than necessary coordinating the dependencies and versions of web code that the React Native app is expecting.
• Security risks and vulnerabilities. The passing of authentication tokens and other shared experiences opens up security risks if not handled properly.
• Lack native feature access from the web. Most DIY web views have difficulties accessing native device features.
• Lack granular controls for collaboration. Determining the right level of access for a web view, which APIs can be used, and how teams can ship independently of each other becomes a challenge.

This is where Portals can help.

Why Ionic Portals?

Ionic Portals allow React web content to be used functionally in React Native apps and empowers development teams to make this happen quickly, without the DIY headaches.

With Ionic Portals, development teams can: 

• Scale large projects and clear feature backlogs by allowing multiple teams to work in parallel
• Launch features at the same time on every platform: Web, iOS, Android, etc.
• Ship features the minute they’re ready by allowing teams to deploy their work independently 
• Share features between multiple apps without having to develop them again.

Portals uses a powerful API to expose native functionality for embedding rich web apps in a controlled manner, a robust web-to-native communication bridge, and a rich ecosystem of native plugins. Portals is also managed by Ionic and comes with a full support team ready to help.

Portals is not just for React Native

Ionic Portals can work with any mobile app. While many micro frontend solutions target traditional web apps, only Portals is specifically designed to address the needs of native mobile applications. And, with the API seamlessly integrated, the web and native interchange goes unnoticed by the user. 

Whether teams are developing pure native iOS, Android, React Native, or Ionic Capacitor apps, Portals will work. 

Ready to get started? 

Portals requires a license to run in a production environment. We also offer a community license for companies making less than $1mil ARR.

Try it out today or get in touch with us to work with Portals for React Native.

About Ionic

Ionic is a leader in enterprise mobile app development, with 5 million developers worldwide and thousands of enterprise customers who use Ionic to build mission-critical apps for their customers, both external and internal. It powers 15% of apps in the app store, not including thousands of apps built internally at enterprises for every line-of-business need. Ionic is unique in that it takes a web-first approach, leveraging HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build high-quality iOS, Android, desktop, and Progressive Web Apps.