Facebook’s React Native gets support for the Universal Windows Platform

At its annual developer conference, Facebook today announced that the company is adding support for the Universal Windows Platform on React Native. For those unfamiliar, React Native is an open source framework from Facebook which allows developers to build native apps using JavaScript and React. According to Microsoft, React Native is the fastest growing open source projects of 2015 with more than 30 thousand stars on GitHub.

At F8, the company showed off the official F8 app, built on React Native and running in Windows 10:

With support for the Universal Windows Platform, developers can now bring their React Native apps to a lot more devices, including Windows 10 PCs, Mobile, HoloLens, Surface Hub, and even the Xbox One. Alongside the new UWP support, Microsoft also announced that the company is releasing a new extension for Visual Studio Code which will allow developers to create and debug React Native apps.

According to Microsoft, this is just the beginning and the company is planning to share more updates in the near future. Nonetheless, UWP support for React Native is really huge, and it will be very interesting to see if this will get some more developers to build apps for Windows 10.

source: Microsoft