Exploring the Best UI Component Libraries for React Native apps

Developers often face bottlenecks ranging from consistent design language to responsive layouts while building React Native applications. React Native’s inbuilt components can partially meet our development specifications, meaning we either build custom components from scratch or use multiple third-party, pre-designed styling components. Luckily, component libraries alleviate this problem by dishing out a more robust approach.

Taking advantage of component libraries can boost productivity, maintain a consistent style structure, and contribute to the overall efficiency of developing visually appealing and responsive apps. In plain terms, component libraries handle all the heavy lifting.

In this article, we'll look at some top open-source React Native UI component libraries. Not only will they assist us in applying a solid approach and enhancing our project delivery time, but they'll also offer exceptional support for React Native platforms like iOS and Android.

What is a component library, and why is it used?

A component library is a collection of reusable user interface (UI) elements or components, pre-designed and developed for easy integration into software applications. These components can vary from simple items like buttons and input fields to more complicated ones like dropdown menus, sliders, modals, and complete layout frameworks.

With a plethora of options available, picking which component library to utilize can be a daunting task. However, after understanding a component library's capabilities, restrictions, and community support, choosing one that suits your app’s specifications will be easier. Let's look at some React Native component libraries.

Gluestack

Gluestack, like any other customizable UI library, is built to make styling less cumbersome. It comprises a set of themed and unstyled components easily integrated across different platforms and devices. Originally, Gluestack was a part of NativeBase, a component library for both React and React Native. With performance and maintainability in mind, NativeBase was split into two parts, focusing on a universal CSS-in-JS library and an independent set of unstyled components. Gluestack has several advantages, some of which are:

• Accessibility: Gluestack provides a vast selection of components to quickly build interfaces that suit your needs while achieving a constant design across different platforms.
• Styling and Themeability: Gluestack's components can be modified to suit an app's requirements. This includes a pre-configured theme in the configuration file containing values like theme tokens, breakpoints, and component themes. Theme tokens represent different design attributes, such as typography or font settings, colors, etc. Tokens can also consistently define styling or UI elements throughout an application.
• Animation Support: Prevents manual implementation of animations across applications with extensive plugin libraries like @legendapp/motion and moti.
• Product Extensions: Gluestack has a range of extensions, like the VS Code extension to quicken development processes and the Figma UI Kit to create mockups and designs.

Currently, Gluestack doesn't seem to be a well-known or established component UI library in the React or React Native ecosystem; however, its key features make it a library developers should adopt.

React Native Paper

React Native Paper is a set of customizable and production-ready React Native components based on Google's Material Design specifications. It offers an option for integrating a Babel plugin, thereby minimizing its bundle size by eliminating modules that are not in use. Overall, React Native Paper is a popular choice for developers looking to create aesthetically pleasing user interfaces for React Native applications. React Native Paper has several essential features, including:

• Cross-Platform Compatibility: Since React Native Paper is explicitly built for React Native, it works seamlessly across both iOS and Android platforms, ensuring a uniform user experience across multiple platforms.
• Material Design Components: React Native Paper features a diverse set of UI components, including buttons, cards, dialogues, lists, and more, all assembled per Material Design principles.
• Customization: The library allows developers to alter the appearance of components through theming and style overrides, creating designs that suit their preferences.
• Community Support: React Native Paper, as an open-source project, has an extensive and active developer community that contributes by submitting bug reports, feature requests, or even code contributions. Being open-source, the nature of the project fosters community collaboration and ensures transparency in its development process.

NativeWind

NativeWind is another popular React Native library. Unlike Gluestack or React Native Paper, NativeWind uses Tailwind CSS as a scripting language, forming a compatibility layer between React Native and CSS. Since React Native's StyleSheet system only provides static styles, NativeWind’s universal style system bridges that gap, creating a consistent styling experience across all React Native platforms. The universal style system consists of UI state styles (active, hover, focus), responsive styles (media queries, dynamic units), device state styles (color scheme, screen sizes, and orientation), and styling inheritance. Some of its key features are:

• Robust Styling System: NativeWind boasts a wide range of styling options such as pseudo-classes (hover, focus, active), parents-to-children state styles that automatically style children based upon parent pseudo-classes, component themes, and more.
• Universal Integration: NativeWind supports and uses the best styling system across multiple platforms.
• Fast Runtime: Utilizes a minimal runtime to process responsive styles (e.g., changes to device orientation and color scheme).
• Easy to set up

Dripsy

Dripsy is another open-source library designed to work seamlessly with React Native's existing styling system while offering additional features and enhancements. Dripsy’s main objective is to create a responsive design for web and React Native applications irrespective of their screen sizes. Some key features of Dripsy include:

• Theming: Dripsy provides theming capabilities, allowing developers to define and apply consistent visual styles across their applications. This includes custom color schemes, typography, and other design tokens.
• Responsive Design: Dripsy allows developers to construct responsive layouts that adapt dynamically to the device's screen size and orientation. This also helps to provide a uniform user experience across devices.
• Utility Functions: It includes utility functions and helpers for common styling tasks, making it easier to write, maintain, and ship stylesheets in React Native apps.
• Customizable UI Components: UI Components like containers, buttons, text inputs, and more can be easily modified to meet the design specifications of applications.
• Universal Integration: Dripsy supports integration with platforms like Android, IOS, web, and more.

Tamagui

Tamagui is a UI kit that aims to bridge the gap between React and React Native applications by addressing the fundamental parts of an app, such as styling, theming, and cross-platform components, while keeping app performance in mind. It utilizes an optimizing compiler to significantly improve performance by hoisting objects and CSS at build-time. Its main advantage is that it creates a consistent design system across web and native platforms. Some major highlights of Tamagui are:

• Universal Integration: Tamagui integrates seamlessly across various platforms such as Android, iOS, web, and more.
• Styling Components: Native apps can be styled with Tamagui’s base components - View and Text, as they are equivalent to React Native’s View and Text. They accept the superset of props that Tamagui supports. You can also build and extend custom and optimizable components.
• Theming: Tamagui has a wide range of theming tools, such as tokens, theme values, and hooks, which apply consistent visual styles across applications. These tools include customized color schemes, fonts, and other design elements.
• Supports Animation: Tamagui leverages the popular open-source library — Moti as a reanimated driver for animation libraries such as react-native-reanimated and React Native Animated.

Galio

Galio is a free, open-source React Native framework that enables beginner-level programmers to quickly build cross-platform mobile apps by leveraging its collection of customizable and reusable UI components. Galio supports theming, allowing developers to define and apply custom app themes easily. Using its components - GalioTheme, withGalio, and GalioProvider, you can create or overwrite custom themes, consume Galio's React Context, and pass down custom themes in your component as a prop or an argument. The custom themes include defining colors, typography, spacing, and other design elements to create a visually cohesive and appealing user interface. Let's look at some significant factors of Galio:

• Customizability: Galio components are highly customizable, allowing developers to adjust styles, colors, and other properties to match their app's design requirements.
• Responsive Design: Galio's components are designed to be responsive, ensuring they adapt well to different screen sizes and orientations.
• Performance Optimization: Galio is optimized for performance, with efficient code and rendering techniques to deliver a smooth and responsive user experience.
• Theming Support: Galio supports theming, making the process of creating and applying custom themes to apps more accessible.
• Accessibility: Provides features and guidelines to ensure that apps built with Galio are accessible to users with disabilities.
• Cross-Platform Compatibility: Galio components work seamlessly on both iOS and Android platforms, enabling developers to build cross-platform React Native apps.

Key factors to consider while selecting a component library

Finding a suitable library for your project is a crucial choice that will significantly impact user experience, maintainability, and development speed. When assessing component libraries, keep the following points in mind:

• Compatibility: Verify the component library's compatibility with your selected technology stack. For instance, if you're building a React Native app, you'll need a library specifically designed for React Native.
• Customization: Evaluate the library's flexibility for customization. Determine whether you can easily modify the appearance and behavior of the library’s components to match your project's design requirements.
• Documentation: Examine how thorough and well-written the library's documentation is. Concise and clear explanations, usage examples, API references, and troubleshooting advice aid developers in using the library effectively.
• Performance: Assess the library's performance metrics, like responsiveness and memory utilization. Performance optimization is necessary to guarantee seamless user experiences, particularly in complex applications.
• Accessibility: Evaluate the library's support for features, such as keyboard navigation, compatibility with screen readers, and semantic markup. Making your application accessible is crucial to ensuring all users, including those with disabilities, can use it.
• Community Support: Consider the size and nature of the library's community. A thriving community can guarantee the library's existence and offer priceless resources, assistance, and contributions.

By meticulously evaluating these factors, you can select a component library that best meets the needs and requirements of your project, thereby contributing to the success of your application development.

In Summary

Building applications in the React Native ecosystem, as much as any other web development ecosystem, can become exhausting when there’s little to no design flexibility to meet one’s app requirements. Thereby, utilizing a reliable component library will solve this issue, covering everything from complex pre-processing to responsive layouts and utility-first styling.