Chapter 2. Project 2 – Image Sharing App

At this point, we know how to create a fully-featured app with a custom interface. You even learned how to add a state management library to control shared data in our app so that the code base remains maintainable and scalable.

In this lesson, we will focus on building the app with a different state management library (Redux), using the camera capabilities, writing platform-specific code, and diving deeper into building a custom user interface, which is both appealing and usable. An image sharing app will serve as a good example for these features and also will set up the basis for understanding how big apps should be built on React Native.

We will reuse most of our code for the two platforms where this app will be available: iOS and Android. Although most of our user interface will be custom, we will use native-base to simplify UI elements as icons. For navigation, we will use react-navigation again as it provides the most commonly used navigation for each platform: tabbed navigation for iOS and drawer menu navigation for Android. Finally, we will use react-native-camera to handle the interaction with the device's camera. This will not only reduce implementation complexity but also will provide us with a large set of features for free that we could use to extend our app in the future.

For this app, we will mock up a number of API calls so that we don't need to build a backend. These calls should be easily replaced by real API when the time to build a connected app comes.