As an expert with over 10 years of app and browser testing experience under my belt, readers often ask—what are the best React Native UI component libraries I should use in 2024? With new options coming out all the time, I know it can get confusing fast.
That‘s why I put together this comprehensive guide examining the top component libraries. I‘ll explain what React Native UI components are, analyze popular options in-depth, compare capabilities across libraries, and arm you with insider tips for picking the right one.
So strap in, reader! By the end, you‘ll feel empowered to select a library that suits your app needs and helps accelerate development.
What are React Native UI Components?
First, what exactly are React Native UI components? Simply put, they are reusable user interface elements that display visual content and handle interactions. We‘re talking things like:
- Buttons
- Forms
- Lists
- Cards
- Navigation Bars
Essentially any piece of the app a user sees and touches. Now you might be wondering—can‘t I just build these components myself from scratch?
Of course you can! But third-party libraries offer some nice advantages:
⏱️ Save development time: Add a polished dropdown menu with just 1 line of code instead of days building your own.
📱 Cross-platform support: Components render properly on both iOS and Android apps.
✏️ Customization: Many libraries allow styling to match your brand.
♿️ Accessibility: Components incorporate ARIA labels, keyboard shortcuts, and more.
👥 Community-backed: Issues get fixed faster by an army of open-source contributors.
Pretty sweet right? By taking advantage of pre-built UI component libraries rather than reinventing the wheel, you and your team can focus efforts on crafting amazing bespoke user experiences.
Now that you know what React Native UI components are and why they can accelerate development, let‘s analyze the top libraries for 2024.
React Native UI Component Leaderboard for 2024
With over 1,500 component libraries to pick from, the selection can feel overwhelming. That‘s why I researched the top projects, pored through documentation, and compiled component capabilities to identify the 5 best React Native UI libraries for 2024.
I based my evaluations on key factors like:
- 🌟 Popularity and community backing
- 🌟 Number of components available out-of-the-box
- 🌟 Customization and theming flexibility
- 🌟 Overall capabilities and features
- 🌟 Project maintenance and recent updates
Let‘s break down my leaderboard picks and see how they stack up.
🥇 1. React Native Elements
Claiming the 👑 top spot with over 23K GitHub stars and constant maintenance from a large open-source community, React Native Elements stands out as a leader.
Breadth of Components
Spanning over 60 reusable elements encompassing common UIs like buttons and inputs to complex components like ratings, tooltips, and parallax scroll views, React Native Elements offers one of the most expansive component libraries.
Whether building a simple listings app or a fully-fledged social platform, you‘re likely to find all the pieces you need here.
Customization Capabilities
While React Native Elements styles components to fit iOS and Android platform conventions out-of-the-box, you can customize almost everything using overrides and theming.
This means you can tune styles to match your brand while maintaining platform appropriateness. Updates also roll out on a regular basis to support changes in React Native itself.
Ease of Use
Detailed documentation filled with examples makes it straightforward to implement React Native Elements in your projects. And should any questions pop up, its vibrant community actively responds on GitHub and StackOverflow.
Key Takeaways:
✅ One of the most comprehensive component libraries
✅ Frequent updates from large open-source community
✅ Highly customizable with theming support
✅ Excellent documentation with examples
🥈 2. React Native Paper
If conforming to Google‘s official Material Design system tops your priorities list, React Native Paper with over 10K GitHub stars is an excellent choice placing second.
Material Design Focus
Built to spec 100% to Google‘s iOS and Android UI/UX guidelines, components take on a uniform modern, sleek aesthetic. So if keeping styles consistent with popular apps like Gmail ranks high for your project, React Native Paper has you covered.
Advanced Components
While including all commonly-used UI elements like buttons, cards, and navigation menus, React Native Paper stretches components further with specialized options like progress indicators, snackbars, and floating action buttons.
These provide immersive animated experiences users love.
Customization
Through theming every element, you can dial-in colors, spacing, typography, shapes, and sizes to meet branding needs while maintaining harmony across components.
Key Takeaways:
✅ Components strictly adhere to Material Design patterns
✅ Advanced specialty elements for interactions
✅ Customizable through robust theming support
✅ Pure focus on UX quality over quantity of components
🥉 3. NativeBase
With over 19K GitHub stars, NativeBase takes third place, offering a lightweight, flexible library optimized for developer speed.
Unstyled Core Components
Unlike other libraries styling components to platform conventions by default, NativeBase starts with unstyled foundation elements. This means you avoid undoing existing styles, letting you rapidly mold components exactly how you imaginate from scratch.
Utility-First
Following functional programming principles, NativeBase focuses on providing practical building blocks needed to construct screens and features. If you just need some buttons, inputs, and tabs for a basic interface, this simplicity can be a benefit.
Cross-Platform Consistent
No matter which platform your app targets, you can ensure UI elements adopt the same look, feel, and behavior across Android and iOS with minimal additional work.
Extreme Customization
Thanks to its unstyled core, you can tap into radical customization capabilities through variant generators, themes, and custom component creation. Want neon pink switches with squiggly animated borders? You can build that!
Key Takeaways:
✅ Unstyled base components enable endless customization
✅ Utility-focused elements help quickly construct UIs
✅ Components render consistently across Android and iOS
✅ Lightning fast to mold to your exact needs
4. Shoutem UI
Sporting over 4.8K GitHub stars, the Shoutem UI library takes a unique approach—focusing on common component blueprints rather than a breadth of elements.
Component Templates
Shoutem UI includes complete templates for screens like login forms, settings pages, and article previews you can quickly customize. This lets you bypass building layouts from scratch.
Design Flexibility
While not as extensive as other libraries component-wise, flexible customization options help fill gaps. You can freely tweak every aspect imaginable from colors to shadows to borders until elements match your vision.
Extendable
Need an oddball element no pre-made option exists for? No worries! Shoutem UI lets you craft custom extensions tailored to niche use cases.
Key Takeaways:
✅ Complete templates for common screens
✅ Advanced customization with unique extension options
✅ Efficient way to jumpstart development
✅ Greatdocs and component catalog to guide usage
5. React Native Material UI
Rounding out my top 5 picks with over 150 GitHub stars, React Native Material UI brings another Material Design aligned option mixing configurability with polish.
Broad Components
Buttons, cards, typography, menus, dividers, snackbars—you name a common component, and this library likely offers a version conforming to Google‘s guidelines. Quality over quantity here.
Control Freak‘s Delight
While some libraries take a "configure once, use everywhere" approach, React Native Material UI lets you tweak every component individually. With granular controls for colors, padding, fonts, shapes, shadows, and more, it‘s a control freak‘s dream!
Modular
Sick of importing bulky libraries bloating your app when you just need a button? This library‘s modular construction allows grabbing only the components you actually want, keeping apps lean.
Key Takeaways:
✅ Broad collection of Material Design components
✅ Heavily configurable on a per component basis
✅ Lean modular assembly
✅ Rapidly build beautiful UIs
Comparing Top React Native UI Component Libraries
Now that we broke down the 5 leading React Native UI component libraries and highlighted their unique capabilities, how do they stack up across evaluation criteria?
I created this comparison chart summarizing strengths and weaknesses to help guide your selection process:
As you can see, each library brings differentiated strengths:
- 🥇 React Native Elements wins best overall with huge component breadth, customization, and community support.
- 🥈 React Native Paper leads for strict Material Design alignment and advanced specialty components. But less overall elements covered.
- 🥉 NativeBase takes simplest and fastest custom builds through unstyled components. But requires more manual setup.
- Shoutem UI provides great templates to jumpstart development. But ranked lower on community adoption currently.
- React Native Material UI brings heavy configurability strengths. But trails others in terms of components and community backing.
So consider tradeoffs as they apply to your app needs and team skills. Do stunning compliant visuals matter most? Need to prototype something super quick? Is a vibrant community for support essential?
Hopefully seeing how options compare clears up deciding between categories leaders. Next I‘ll provide tips for narrowing down your best fit.
Tips for Picking the Right Library
While comparing top contenders paints a feature picture, how do you select what will mesh best for your specific app and team?
After testing thousands of apps over my career, here are 5 insider tips I recommend using:
1️₣ Consider your design system needs
If strictly conforming to Material Design, go with a specialized option like React Native Paper. Want more general components that layer on iOS or Android styles? Pick React Native Elements.
2️₣ Weight documentation quality
A library lives and dies by its docs. Well-documented options with ample code examples will better support your team integrating components.
3️₣ Determine theming flexibility requirements
Some apps demand heavy style customization to realize a brand vision. In those cases prioritize libraries promoting dynamic theme creation.
4️₣ Evaluate commit frequency
Similar to weighing community size, libraries with recent code commits signal engaged maintenance to quickly fix emerging React Native issues.
5️₣ Audit essential components
Carefully tally screen elements and interactions mandatory for your app flow. Ensure prospective libraries cover all needed checkboxes to prevent supplementation down the road.
Armed with these insider tips for comparing React Native UI component library strengths against project needs, I‘m confident you‘ll spotlight the best fit for your next mobile app!
But a last critical step remains…
Best Practices for Testing React Native UI Components
While third-party libraries accelerate development, they introduce external code requiring rigorous testing for quality and reliability.
Through extensive testing experience spanning thousands of real-world devices, I highly recommend keeping these 5 best practices in mind:
Document edge case scenarios – Outline situations like missing assets, extreme data values, overflow content, poor connectivity etc that could visually break components.
Automated interaction testing – Use a framework like Appium to tap buttons, enter forms, swipe elements to validate interactivity functions as intended across devices.
Multi-device coverage – Exercise components on a variety of iOS and Android devices covering various screen sizes, OS versions, and hardware profiles looking for anomalies.
Accessibility validation – Ensure elements include proper ARIA attributes, keyboard navigation, and screen reader support meeting disability needs.
Visual regression testing – Leverage solutions like Percy that use AI to detect unintended UI changes across commits proactively.
By combining robust React Native component libraries with diligent testing methodologies, you now have a proven formula for accelerating delivery of stunning mobile experiences worth sharing!
Putting It All Together
Whew, we covered a lot of ground today exploring React Native UI component libraries!
Let‘s recap key takeaways:
- 👍 React Native UI components accelerate app development with reusable elements
- 👍 We broke down the top 5 libraries for 2024 based on in-depth capability analysis
- 👍 Comparison tables and tips help narrow options best fitting your needs
- 👍 Following testing best practices ensures high quality
At the end of the day, every app and team has unique needs. So consider your goals, timelines, experience levels, and project complexity when deciding on a library.
And feel free to reach out with any other questions that pop up along your journey! Leveraging my decade of mobile testing expertise, I‘m always happy to guide you towards React Native UI component solutions optimized for your success.
Let me know if you found this guide helpful. And all the best as you venture forth building the next big thing!
