Developers looking to make the leap from web to mobile apps often have a tough road ahead of them, as the two formats can have very different requirements and code structures. Facebook is looking to make this transition a little bit easier by open-sourcing its React Native framework for all users.

“There are many reasons the native mobile environment is more difficult to work with than the web,” Facebook software engineer Tom Occhino wrote in a blog post announcing the new open-source format. “For one thing, it’s harder to lay things out on the screen, and we often have to manually compute the size and position of all our views. We also don’t have access to React or Relay, which have made it easier to scale the process of developing websites and growing our engineering organization. One of the most painful things about our transition to mobile, though, is how much it’s slowed down our development velocity.”

According to Occhino, Facebook has been using its React Native framework internally “for some time now,” and it has greatly sped up the mobile app development process.

React Native is a spinoff of Facebook’s React JavaScript platform, a popular framework used by the social network and many others to develop web apps. With React Native, developers can easily pull in existing JavaScript programs and access native iOS functions, which both improves performance speed and shortens development time.

“The only difference in the mobile environment is that instead of running React in the browser and rendering to divs and spans, we run it in an embedded instance of JavaScriptCore inside our apps and render to higher-level platform-specific components,” Occhino wrote. “One of the best parts about this approach is that we can adopt it incrementally, building new products on top of it or converting old products to use it whenever and wherever it makes sense. Just as we didn’t need to rewrite all of Facebook.com in order to start using React in some places, we don’t need to rebuild our entire mobile Facebook applications in order to start realizing the benefits of React Native.”

By making the framework open source, Facebook wants to “develop in the open as much as possible, collaborating with others who are facing the same challenges.”

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