In the world of mobile app development, we’re always looking for shorter development cycles, quicker time to deployment, and better app performance. With two operating systems dominating the landscape, businesses creating mobile apps often face a compromise: apps that provide a better user experience, or apps that are faster to develop and run on more platforms and devices? At the crossroads of user experience and ease of development is the hybrid mobile app—an app built with technology many developers already know (like JavaScript, or HTML5 and CSS) that are wrapped in a container allowing it to run natively on a device. Hybrid app frameworks have come a long way to bridge the gap between the performance of a native app and the ease of development of a web app. On the leading edge of this technology is Facebook’s React Native user interface (UI) design framework. Here’s a look at how this impressive JavaScript library is upping the ante for hybrid mobile apps. Gone are the WebView components of other hybrid mobile apps. This is possible because React Native’s building blocks are reusable “native components” that compile directly to native. Components you’d use in iOS or Android have counterparts right in React, so you’ll get a consistent look and feel. This component-based structure also allows you to build apps with a more agile, web-style approach to development than typical hybrid frameworks, but without any web at all. The app will have the speed, look, and functionality of a native mobile application.