Creating Onboarding Screens in React Native: A Step-by-Step Guide
When building a React Native app, creating an effective onboarding process is crucial to engage users and introduce them to your app’s features. In this tutorial, we’ll explore one way to create onboarding screens using the react-native-viewpager community package.
Prerequisites
Before we dive in, make sure you have the following installed on your local environment:
- Node.js version >= 12.x.x
- Access to a package manager like npm, yarn, or npx
Getting Started
Let’s create a new React Native project and install the required dependencies. Open a terminal window and execute the following commands:
npx react-native init MyOnboardingApp
cd MyOnboardingApp
npm install react-native-viewpager
About React Native ViewPager
The react-native-viewpager component was initially designed for Android devices but now supports both iOS and Android platforms. It uses native views implementations on each mobile platform, making it a reliable choice for creating onboarding screens.
Creating the Onboarding Screen
Let’s create an onboarding screen with multiple child views, each representing a different state of data to display. We’ll start by creating an initial structure for our files and directories:
src/screens
src/screens/Onboarding.js
src/screens/components
src/screens/components/Page.js
src/screens/components/Footer.js
src/screens/components/RoundedButton.js
Next, we’ll create a reusable Page component that accepts three props: backgroundColor, iconName, and title. This component will render a simple UI using @expo/vector-icons.
Adding Navigation Logic
To navigate between pages, we’ll create a Footer component with a RoundedButton that responds to presses. We’ll also use the useRef hook to determine the current page number and update it accordingly.
Integrating React Navigation
Finally, we’ll integrate the react-navigation library to navigate from the onboarding screen to the main application. We’ll create a mock Home screen and use the stack navigator pattern to switch between screens.
Putting it all Together
With our onboarding screen and navigation logic in place, we can now test our app. Run the command expo start to start the development server and see the onboarding screen in action.
By following this tutorial, you’ve learned how to create a basic onboarding screen in React Native using react-native-viewpager. You can customize this component to fit your app’s needs and explore other features of react-native-viewpager to create more complex onboarding flows.