2022’s Top 5 React Native UI Libraries

How amazing is it to see a random motion animating from a subject? Quite surprisingly, that seems to be beyond anything in our real-life experience. Nothing less than eye candy!

Animation and visual graphics have become critical elements in mobile apps, and using them in the right way offer a delightful experience to users. Take Facebook or Instagram, for instance; these software products have changed how we consider customer journey and user-friendliness.

That being said, did you ever wonder about the technology that stands behind all these boons?

The answer is React Native. Since 2015, It has been offering us the finest set of animation libraries and UI components with a dynamic declarative API. Accordingly, the community is growing with more new components and libraries to help you customize and manage UI resources throughout all the stages of mobile app development.

Hence, with so many options, choosing a particular library for your new React Native project can be a tall order.

Don’t worry! I can help you shortlist the best ones. This article will share a list of the top React Native UI components libraries so that you can kickstart your UX journey with stellar apps.

But before we get into that, let’s talk a little about React Native Libraries in the first place.

Quick Overview of React Native and Its UI Libraries

Facebook, one of the tech giants, created and manages this app development framework in 2015 to help developers build cross-platform apps with a native look and feel (that’s why the name React Native).

And ever since, it has been winning the hearts of developers and enterprises in every corner; thanks to its ease of use, rich feature set, automated upgrades, stunning capabilities, improved UI/UX, mild learning curve, strong community, and so on.

Now, React Native has a broad range of UI elements and libraries to make software development less time-consuming and simplify the work of developers. The libraries contain a set of highly useful components that you can integrate into your web or mobile app to build impressive interfaces.

So, you can use those ready-made components and even customize them as per your application needs instead of writing lines of code from scratch.

On a related note, if you’re confusing React Native with React.js, here’s an interesting read on React vs React Native.

5 Best React Native UI Libraries to Build Front-End

You can find a variety of React Native libraries on GitHub to use in your project. However, the star-based rating method can be pretty tricky and misleading as well. Hence, here I have prepared a list of the most popular libraries that developers frequently use on different projects. Check them out!

React Native Elements

React Native Elements is perhaps the first library that pops up in a developer’s mind when they hear about React Native. Although this UI build kit follows Material Design principles, it’s more than just an opinionated design system; it offers developers fine control over the component structure.

Hence, you can model the components according to your need and have full control over the app design. It can also save a huge amount of time for you since you don’t have to rewrite the same code repeatedly. As a result, you’ll be able to quickly build a truly appealing app with easy-to-use and eye-catch features.

TL;DR

• 22.2k GitHub stars
• Full documentation
• Open-source and MIT license
• Support for Expo

Lottie for React Native

Airbnb developed this one-of-a-kind UI framework for creating impressive animations. You can create native Android and iOS apps with free featured animations that the Lottie community provides. Additionally, this library allows you to create customized animations using Adobe After Effects.

With the help of the Bodymovin extension, Lotti can export your customized interfaces to JSON format and then render them in your native app. Because of the small-sized and vector-formatted files, you’ll be able to create a high-performance app while creating a visually-appealing UI.

TL;DR

• 14.9k GitHub stars
• Full documentation with Expo support
• Apache License 2.0
• Open-source with community support

NativeBase

This veteran library has been around since React Native existed. NativeBase is one of the best cross-platform app development frameworks that supports a rich and extensive set of production-ready UI components. Apart from the basic support, they also provide pre-configuration for useful functionalities.

NativeBase is a perfect starting point to create visually aesthetic and easy-to-use apps. It offers supported themes and paid templates that you can use for a shorter development time. And since it has customizable features which you can also integrate with added functionalities, building a unified interface becomes quite easy and quick.

TL;DR

• 17.4k GitHub stars
• Apache License 2.0
• Live Example
• Open-source and Expo support

React Native Material UI

This UI framework provides an easier and faster app development process with 20 different customizable components like avatars, toolbars, drawers, buttons, etc. It uses Google Material Design principles that help you improve user experience by simplifying navigation and other features.

You can easily integrate your project style with self-supporting React components and shape them into a dynamic UI. Additionally, those components are independent of any global stylesheet.

TL;DR

• 3.7k GitHub stars
• MIT License
• Free and open-source
• Community support through GitHub issues

React Native UI Kitten

What an excellent name for a React Native framework! Based on the Eva Design System, this UI component library offers over 480 icons and allows you to create custom themes. You can also use or extend two in-built visual themes.

With 20+ vital UI components, UI Kitten is one of the few libraries that’s compatible with the right-to-left coding method for each of its components (note this fact if you’re working on global apps). It also supports web development. In this library, style classes are separated from business logic, and UI components are stored in the same way. This approach is similar to CSS, wherein style definitions are not attached to the code.

TL;DR

• 6.8k GitHub stars
• Open-source and MIT License
• Full documentation
• Dedicated support for the paid version

Concluding Thoughts

So, what do you think is the best React Native UI component library?

The answer is simple – the one that fulfills your software and business requirements.

The UI libraries I have mentioned in this article are all actively developed and maintained by the community. These frameworks have been around to help you build robust apps in a shorter span of time so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you work on a React Native project. As long as you know what to accomplish in your UI design, any of these options would do the trick.

The ultimate goal is to hire competent React Native Developers and create an app that caters to your users’ demands.

Do you have a React Native library of your choice?