Best Practices for Finding Android & iOS Compatible Libraries in React Native

A searchable database of libraries created especially for React Native is called React Native Directory. When searching for a library for your React Native application, start here.

If you are unable to locate a library designed just for React Native in the directory, the npm registry is the next best option after the React Native Directory.

Although the npm registry is the best place to get JavaScript libraries, not all of the packages it contains will work with React Native. Among the various JavaScript development environments are React Native, Node.js, web browsers, Electron, and others. Libraries compatible with these environments may be found in npm.

How to determine library compatibility with react-native

React Native often does not support libraries designed for other platforms.

Example: React-select, designed for the web to explicitly target react-dom, and rimraf, created for Node.js and interacting with your computer's file system, are two examples.

Reason: react-dom is the package that provides methods to interact with the DOM (Document Object Model) in a web environment. On the other hand, react-native is a framework for building native applications for iOS, Android, and other platforms. It does not use the web's DOM at all. Instead, React Native uses native components (like View, Text, etc.) that are rendered directly by the platform's native UI elements.

You will eventually develop an understanding of this, but in the meanwhile, the simplest approach to learn more is to give it a try. In the event that it turns out installed library is not functioning with React Native, you may remove packages using npm uninstall.

Does every library in React Native Directory is compatible with every versions of react-native?

No, just refer to the README to know which version of the library you should install. 

To install specific version of library refer following syntax:

npm install <library-name>@<version-number>