Microsoft Goes All-In On React Native For Their Mobile Apps

Microsoft has been in love with React, an open-source library from Facebook for building user interfaces, for quite some time. In addition to building an open-source library for cross platform UIs, this summer they started using React for their web and desktop apps.

Recently, that love affair started spilling over into their mobile apps. We scanned Microsoft's iOS and Android apps and discovered that 38 of them, including the likes of Word, Excel, Xbox, and many others, were recently updated to include React Native in their bundle.

Here are all the iOS apps Microsoft recently added React Native to:

An impressive list, counting the extended Office suite of apps. On Android things are very similar:

For context, these apps have been downloaded by more than 4.3M users in the last month in the U.S. alone! While we don’t know the extent of Microsoft's use of React Native in these apps, this type of move is the kind that isn't just experimental. And that's great news for React developers!

React Native Continues to Grow

In the last year use of React Native has nearly doubled, going from being installed in just about 15K apps at the beginning of 2018 to being installed in over 27K apps right now. As impressive as that is however, React still some catching up to do before it can compete with heavy hitters like Cordova and Unity, each installed in more than 100K apps. We'll continue to track and report on its adoption.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.