Rather than providing individuals we think it's best to provide access to our React Native expertise. Where our React Native engineers can work closely with your current development team to solve problems together, knowledge sharing, guiding, mentoring, coaching and upskilling your mobile development team.

Nexteam’s React Native engineers would not directly implement product features for your mobile app. Instead they would work closely with the team to boost productivity as a whole, improve the quality of the application and code base. This form of collaborative consulting, mentoring and coaching in our experience is highly effective at upskilling a development team quickly.

Our React Native Experience

Nexteam was pivotal in building a major newspaper's new React Native based mobile app. We had React Native engineers, native Android & iOS engineers, Product Manager, Scrum Master and Service Owner. Who were instrumental in building the mobile app in React Native and the surrounding support wrapper.

Our React Native engineers solved many interesting challenges on the project.

An initial challenge was that the app kept crashing due to the lack of memory on low spec devices. One solution was using deferred module loading and lazy rendering, which helped improve stability and performance of the app.

The wide range of devices that Android users had, caused some interesting problems, with some on unsupported versions, the app had to work on all. A lot of time was spent dealing with performance issues and optimising the React Native app at multiple levels. Another challenge specific to Android was that React Native at the time used the default Android Javascript engine, which was very slow, resulting in janky rendering. That was solved by switching to the V8 Javascript engine (as used by Chrome) and later Hermes.

“A big part of doing React Native well is understanding how React is interfaced with the native UI and what the bottlenecks are. From a UX and Design perspective, understanding material design and the apple human interface guidelines used by native elements versus what’s possible within react native.”

After the app was released we actively mentored junior developers in London and an offshore team. This included pairing with the junior developers, reviewing their work. As the other developers improved we slowly reduced the time actively mentoring, until completely rolling off the project.

One of the more hidden challenges the junior developers faced was understanding the nuances of React Native versus native and the mental model they have of being mobile developers. Our senior React Native engineers spent time sharing their knowledge to get the junior developers to understand the fundamentals.

Service Details

Nexteam’s React Native engineers would help:

• Assist developers in investigating and resolving issues with the React Native app, including pairing with developers to investigate issues and investigating issues independently.
• Advise on the best approach to building React Native applications, including application architecture, and participating in solution design discussions.
• Provide insight upon industry best practices around React Native and mobile app development.
• Review React Native code changes as part of the development process, suggesting improvements and helping ensure code quality.
• Participate in team meetings, to provide the benefits of their knowledge and experience to the team when discussing solutions and other mobile application development activities.
• Bring the benefits of our connections into and knowledge of the React Native community.
• Provide 1-2-1 mentoring and coaching on software development with React Native to the development team.
• Run informal knowledge sharing sessions with software developers on React Native and mobile application development topics.
• Help create and improve any technical documentation for the mobile application code base.
• Provide feedback on your Mobile App and React Native strategy during team meetings.
• Assist with hiring senior React Native Developers into your current development team, providing input on CVs and interviews as required.

With this approach you don’t just get access to our expert React Native engineers who are directly interfacing with the your development team. Internally Nexteam is a highly collaborative environment, where our wider team can provide input, discuss and share their wealth of knowledge and experience. Within Nexteam and if one of our team members needs help or advice we all swarm around them to help them out and the client they are working with.

Nexteam aims to provide a consistent set of people to engage with the your development team. This may vary depending on the availability and the nature of problems encountered. We want to use this flexibility to provide the best people to tackle the problems faced.

No matter the scale and experience level of your existing team, Nexteam can help take your team to the next level. Providing as much or as little time as you need.