Unlocking the Power of Content Sharing in React Native Apps
The Importance of Content Sharing
In today’s digital landscape, social media platforms have become an integral part of our lives. As engineers, we build products that impact people’s lives, but getting those solutions into the hands of users requires more than just shipping them into production. One crucial aspect of this is content sharing. By enabling users to share content with other applications, we can increase the visibility and audience of our business.
Why Content Sharing Matters
From the user’s perspective, sharing content helps them build a collection of interesting content, share it with their networks on other platforms, and bookmark it for later. For businesses, user-generated sharing opens the door to potential new users and increases brand visibility. As developers, we can provide this functionality using React Native’s inbuilt share package or more robust alternatives like React Native Share.
The Limitations of React Native’s Inbuilt Share Package
While React Native’s inbuilt share package provides a basic sharing feature, it has its limitations. For instance, it can’t easily share other forms of data like PDF or audio files. Moreover, it doesn’t allow sharing to specific social apps like Instagram Stories. To overcome these limitations, we need a more robust solution.
Introducing React Native Share
React Native Share is a powerful package that enables social sharing with other applications. It comes with inbuilt functionalities for sharing PDF files, images, and more on Facebook Stories and other social applications. Let’s explore this package with a demo using Expo.
Sharing a Link
To share a link, we import the React Native Share package, define three sets of options (title, message, and URL), and create a share function that handles calling the share’s open method. We then pass this share function to a button. When tested on an emulator, different share options become available.
Sharing Media Files
To share media files, we need to share the base64 encoded format of the file. We can create two buttons to share an image and a PDF file. When tapped, a UI displaying different apps that support sharing is shown.
Sharing to Specific Applications
We can share directly to a specific application, like WhatsApp, by accessing the singleShare method on the share package. We pass the social app we want to target, followed by the WhatsApp number, and finally, the file we want to share.
Detecting Installed Apps for Sharing
To detect if a user has an app installed, we can use the isPackageInstalled method provided by the React Native Share package. We can refactor the singleShare function to check if WhatsApp is installed before calling the singleShare method.
Taking it to the Next Level
By detecting installed apps and providing a better user experience, we can take our application to the next level. However, it’s essential to note that the React Native Share package doesn’t yet support Expo-managed, bootstrapped applications, and won’t work with the Expo Go client.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve explored the importance of content sharing, the limitations of React Native’s inbuilt share package, and the superpowers of the React Native Share package. By enabling content sharing in our apps, we can increase brand visibility and provide a better user experience. Go build something great!