React mobile app development feedbacks [Yocable]

 

👉🏻Introduction

Recently, I had the opportunity to work on a mobile application project built for Android using a React-based stack powered by Vite. While my background is primarily focused on Flutter for mobile development, this project pushed me outside of my usual technical comfort zone. Exploring a React-centric approach for mobile delivery was both a challenge and a valuable learning experience: 

The application itself remained intentionally lightweight, but it opened the door to new architectural patterns, tooling, and development workflows

I used React hybrid JavaScript framework

👉🏻The application [Yocable]

The application is designed to strengthen language learning by focusing specifically on vocabulary acquisition. It supports learning across a wide range of languages, with approximately ten languages available. An advanced learning algorithm dynamically emphasizes words that are harder for the user to retain, ensuring more efficient memorization over time. In addition, users can enrich their learning experience by adding their own custom vocabulary, allowing the app to adapt to personal learning goals and contexts.

Yocable for Android

👉🏻Conception

The client had already clearly defined the functional requirements of the application, which allowed me to focus primarily on the technical design and implementation. 

My role was to structure the application architecture by cleanly separating concerns across distinct layers, ensuring maintainability, scalability, and readability. This layered approach made it easier to reason about the codebase, isolate responsibilities, and evolve individual components without impacting the overall system.

Logical blocs to design

👉🏻React challenges to know before to start coding

From my experience, below are the main constraints and challenges I encountered while working with the React ecosystem. These aspects should be carefully considered during the design phase and may also be valuable if you are planning to build your own application using React.

1) Ecosystem fragmentation and lack of a unified framework

React does not provide a fully integrated, opinionated mobile framework. Building a mobile app often requires assembling multiple independent libraries for routing, state management, data fetching, and overall architecture. While this flexibility is powerful, it forces developers to make many critical technical decisions very early in the project. The impact is a longer design phase, a higher risk of architectural inconsistencies, and increased maintenance complexity, especially as the application grows or the team expands.

2) State management complexity and architectural discipline

State management in React can become difficult to control without strict architectural rules. Business logic may end up scattered across components through hooks, context providers, and external stores. Over time, this can lead to tightly coupled UI and logic layers. The impact is a reduced code readability, harder debugging, and costly refactors when requirements evolve or features scale beyond their initial scope.

3) Performance challenges related to re-renders

React’s rendering model relies on frequent component re-renders driven by state and prop changes. Without careful optimization, unnecessary re-renders can occur, especially in mobile contexts where resources are more constrained. Managing dependencies in hooks (useEffect, useMemo, useCallback) requires precision and experience. The impact is a greater need for profiling and manual optimization, with performance issues that can be subtle, difficult to detect, and sometimes device-specific.

4) Heavy reliance on the JavaScript tooling ecosystem

React applications depend on a broad and evolving JavaScript toolchain: Node.js, package managers, bundlers, transpilers, and a large number of third-party dependencies. While this ecosystem is mature, it can be fragile over time due to breaking changes or dependency conflicts. The impact is a continuous maintenance burden, where development effort is sometimes spent resolving tooling issues rather than focusing on product features.

5) Capacitor and native feature integration challenges

When using React with Capacitor, accessing native mobile features often depends on third-party plugins. Finding a plugin that is well-maintained, compatible with the current Capacitor version, and supports both iOS and Android can be challenging. In some cases, plugins are outdated, incomplete, or behave differently across platforms. The impact is additional integration effort, potential platform-specific workarounds, and sometimes the need to develop custom native bridges, which increases both development time and project complexity.

👉🏻App preview

  

Dynamic theming bonus ✨

🥳 This application is designed to be used on a daily basis, making vocabulary learning simple, engaging, and consistent over time. It is currently available for download on Android, allowing users to integrate learning seamlessly into their everyday routine.

From a technical perspective, the application remains relatively simple, which made React a sufficient and efficient choice for its development. However, for more complex applications requiring deeper integration with native mobile features, a more advanced mobile framework would likely be a better fit.

💾 Download here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yolointeractive.yocable