In mobile app development, enhancing user engagement and interaction is paramount. Developers achieve this by creating user interfaces and incorporating animations. As users find joy in interacting with animated elements, they significantly enhance the overall user experience. This principle holds for React Native app development as well.

A well-crafted UI coupled with well-executed animations for various user activities plays a pivotal role in boosting engagement within an app. Therefore, leveraging UI components and animation libraries becomes essential when working with the React Native platform. This blog delves into key React Native UI Components and Animation libraries that contribute to creating a superior user experience. Let’s delve into them below!

Top React Native Animation Libraries for Seamless App Interactions

Here are the top animation libraries that you can use in your next React native app development project:

React Native Animatable

React Native Animatable stands out as a premier animation library. Especially effective in crafting micro-interactions within React Native applications, it offers declarative wrappers. These wrappers facilitate the animation of React Native elements, enabling generic transitions, loops, and more through a user-friendly API.

In numerous applications, you’ll encounter constant bouncing, swiping, sliding, and similar actions. React Native Animatable streamlines the process by providing meticulously animated and preconfigured elements for UI experts. This eliminates the need to manually rewrite commonly used animations, as the library comes equipped with over 60 built-in animations for effortless integration.

React Native Reanimated

This library offers a comprehensive and robust low-level abstraction for constructing an animated library API. Additionally, its built-in Animated API is meticulously crafted to provide exceptional flexibility for gesture-based interactions while seamlessly integrating animations into apps. For creating such interactions, this library seamlessly integrates with the Gesture Handler library.

React Native Reanimated boasts full native support, enabling animations to be generated directly on the native thread rather than the JavaScript thread. Notably, this is backward compatible, eliminating the need for extensive code modifications or rebuilding animations for specific React Native core elements when transitioning to this library.

Developed and actively maintained by Expo and Software Mansion developers, this animation library also excels in performance on lower-grade devices.

Fluid Transitions for React Navigation

This JavaScript library is designed to execute smooth transitions between components, particularly during navigation using the React Navigation library. It introduces a new navigator known as Fluid Navigator.

Fluid Navigator replaces the StackNavigator in React Navigation, offering a comparable API and configuration process to its predecessor. Beyond that, it enables the creation of customized transitions and supports gestures for navigation. This library is particularly useful for implementing shared transitions between similar elements, even when these elements belong to different navigating screens.

React Native Shared Element

This library provides native building blocks designed to facilitate shared element transitions, along with primitives for enhancing the creation of custom transitions. These transitions are seamlessly integrated into the core React Native API.

Addressing various issues through its native application approach, this animation library resolves challenges like Image resize mode transitions, Cross-fade transitions, flickering prevention, shadow transitions, ScrollView clipping, and GPU & CPU interface. It also includes a standalone version, React Navigation Shared Element, supporting shared transitions between navigators when used in conjunction with the React Navigation library.

Pose

This React Native animation library operates on physics principles, allowing for smooth animations. Its unique approach involves automatic animation selection based on the specified property name.

Notably, this library supports both mount and unmount animations, along with gestures like to a React element. It is worth mentioning that this library is also accessible for Vue and the React.JS library.

Lottie

Developed by Airbnb, this animation library translates After-Effect animations into a JSON file, which can be exported and seamlessly incorporated into your application.

Lottie is versatile and compatible with React Native, Web, Windows, Android, and iOS platforms. To integrate Lottie into React Native, you can install the Lottie-react-native wrapper.

React Spring

Offering ease of use, this physics-based animation library is cross-platform, supporting react-native-web, react-native, web, and other platforms. React Spring provides an API in the form of plug-and-play React Hooks.

Addressing a wide range of UI animation requirements, this spring-physics-based library is your go-to solution for translating concepts into dynamic interfaces. With React Spring, embrace a modern animation approach that seamlessly bridges declarative, and imperative react motions.

React Native SVG Animations

This animation library facilitates the display of scalable vector graphic images through animation. It offers numerous wrapper elements to explain the animation process.

React Native Redash

This library contains an excellent gesture handler toolkit, ensuring a smooth and effortless user experience.

React Native GL Model View

This animation library enables the importation of Wavefront (.OBJ) files, allowing you to display, rotate, scale, or animate 3D textured models.

React Native Flip Card

This animation library is a card element featuring a flip motion designed for React Native on both iOS and Android platforms.

Best React Native UI Component Libraries

Here are the best UI Component libraries that you can use in your react native app development:

React Native Maps

If you’re eager to delve deeper into map functionalities, consider React Native Maps. This library offers customized map components for both iOS and Android. Developers have the flexibility to personalize map styles, adjust the map view region, customize markers, and overlay additional components on the map.

Utilizing the animated API, you can also incorporate zoom and positioning animations for an enhanced user experience.

NativeBase

For aspiring React Native developers, NativeBase serves as an excellent starting point for app creation. This library boasts open-source projects, including a tutorial app, a Twitter Clone app, and a Native starter app. Additionally, there’s an option for a premium starter kit.

As a well-recognized UI component library, NativeBase is celebrated for offering mobile-first and accessible elements. It empowers developers to establish and maintain a consistent design framework across both web and mobile platforms. The library furnishes a curated set of elements specifically tailored for React Native UI development.

NativeBase prioritizes accessibility, incorporating React Native ARIA and themeable design systems optimized for both dark and light modes.

Whether you need essential elements like icons, overlays, flex, checkboxes, and buttons, or advanced elements such as row, skeleton, and column for layout, along with features like toasts, NativeBase is the ideal choice. Powered by a Styled System, NativeBase assists developers in crafting personalized UI elements.

React Native Elements

React Native Elements stands out as a user-friendly, cross-platform UI component library featuring a plethora of contributed elements. It facilitates easy customization with support for personalized themes. The library includes diverse elements such as badges, pricing components, avatars, star ratings, dividers, social icon buttons, and overlays.

More than just an extensive UI kit for React Native app development, React Native Elements aims to streamline the process for developers. By offering a pre-built kit with a stable API and a consistent look and feel, it eliminates the need for developers to assemble various packages, providing a hassle-free experience.

React Native Camera

React Native Camera or RN Camera, is an excellent library designed to facilitate communication with your device’s camera. It empowers developers by offering straightforward functions, eliminating the need to delve into intricate native code.

The camera component of React Native extends its support to various functionalities, including barcode scanning, face identification, capturing photographs, text recognition, and recording videos. This support spans across both Android and iOS platforms.

React Native Paper

This open-source, cross-platform library offers over 30 production-ready and customizable elements adhering to Material Design principles. Providing full support for both dark and light themes, it allows seamless transitions between different themes.

If you’ve customized the theme, simply leverage the Appearance API of React Native to apply theme switching based on device settings. Paper streamlines the process of adding simple, clean, and highly customizable UI elements to your development, ensuring a swift setup for your remaining MVP.

Bit for React Native

Bit is not merely a library but a powerful tool for crafting component-driven applications. This versatile toolchain is instrumental in creating systems that are more comprehensible, faster to develop, simpler to collaborate on, and easier to inspect and maintain.

Integrate Bit into your project to track components and export them to Bit’s virtual monorepo, Bit.dev. This ensures that every component becomes accessible and usable across various projects. Developers gain the flexibility to independently create and maintain components, assembling them into multiple applications tailored to their specific needs. With Bit, they can effortlessly add or remove components from applications to modify functionality, all without the need to establish a development environment for making changes.

React Native Gifted Chat

If you’re in search of a comprehensive chat UI library for your React Native app, look no further than React Native Gifted Chat. Chat functionality is a prominent feature in many apps, and with React Native Gifted Chat, implementing this feature becomes significantly more straightforward. This library also seamlessly integrates with Redux.

Each element provided by this library is easily customizable and written in TypeScript. Notable elements include clickable links, message copying to the clipboard, loading previous messages, multiple text input and attachment options, avatar creation for profiles, and enhanced bot functionality.

React Native Snap Carousel

React Native offers multiple approaches for displaying a collection of photos in a gallery view, with the Carousel being a popular technique for achieving this. The Carousel provides various layouts, previews, efficient management of a substantial number of items, parallax images, and more.

Compatible with both iOS and Android, the Carousel allows users to navigate through a collection of images presented in both vertical and horizontal orientations. In essence, it enables developers to showcase their content seamlessly on various mobile devices.

For incorporating stylish carousels or sliders into your application, consider React Native Snap Carousel. This UI library offers numerous tips for performance optimization, is well-documented, and includes additional useful features. Snap Carousel boasts a comprehensive API with various properties and plug-and-play layout patterns. Furthermore, it empowers developers to implement animations and customize interpolations.

Conclusion

The key objective of the React Native UI component and animation libraries is to assist developers in creating user-friendly interfaces, animations, and enhancements within an app. These libraries are highly customizable and come equipped with impressive built-in features. If you’re embarking on developing a React Native app, selecting any of the mentioned libraries is sure to elevate the overall user experience.