Facebook is expanding the reach of apps that are made with its React Native framework. Today, as part of its F8 conference, the company announced it has added Windows 10 UWP support for making apps that use React Native.
In a blog post, Microsoft stated:
The new UWP support extends the reach of these native apps to a new market of 270 million active Windows 10 devices, and the opportunity to reach beyond mobile devices, to PCs, and even the Xbox One and HoloLens. For Windows app developers, it also means an opportunity to embed React Native components into their existing UWP apps and to leverage the developer tools and programming paradigms that React Native offers.
React Native is an open source project, and Microsoft will contribute by offering tools such as the React Native extension for Visual Studio Code to that community. It added:
As opposed to a "write once, run everywhere" kind of framework, React Native expects each platform to differentiate with distinct features and capabilities that apps can, and should, uniquely capture. Instead, they use the phrase "learn once, write everywhere" to capture the fact that React Native is as much about the programming model and developer tools that populate its ecosystem as it is about sharing code. The same goes for React Native on UWP; an app written for UWP with React Native should feel just as natural as an app written directly in XAML.
