Microsoft adds Universal Windows Platform support to Facebook’s React Native

Microsoft and Facebook are announcing today that the Facebook-led React Native open source software for native mobile app development is getting Universal Windows Platform (UWP) support.

The new UWP development software is available now. But Microsoft will be sharing the code as part of the React Native project, said Christine Abernathy, developer advocate for Facebook’s open source team, at Facebook’s F8 developer conference.

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“The new UWP support extends the reach of these native apps to a new market of 270 million active Windows 10 devices, and the opportunity to reach beyond mobile devices, to PCs, and even the Xbox One and HoloLens,” Microsoft Developer Experience software engineer Eric Rozell wrote in a blog post. “For Windows app developers, it also means an opportunity to embed React Native components into their existing UWP apps and to leverage the developer tools and programming paradigms that React Native offers.”

Also today Facebook said that Samsung would bring support for its Tizen operating system to React Native. And Facebook itself is open-sourcing a Facebook software development kit (SDK) for React Native, with iOS and Android support on board.

Like other Web companies, Facebook regularly contributes software to the open source community. This isn’t just out of goodwill; it can also get individual developers and development teams actively using and improving the technology and even help the company find new talent to hire. Now React Native will become essentially a more powerful development platform, even as Microsoft is doing a lot with cross-platform development — with the recent acquisition of mobile app development company Xamarin.

In January, Facebook open-sourced Transform, a technology for reducing the file size of videos. At F8 last year Facebook open-sourced the Nuclide integrated development environment for React and React Native. Also last year Facebook open-sourced tools for a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning.

As for React Native, it all started with the open source release of React in 2013, with React Native for iOS and Android becoming available in 2015.

Facebook has an elaborate blog post on the state of React Native here.