Styling our app with NativeBase

React Native includes a powerful way to style our components and screens using Flexbox and a CSS-like API but, for this app, we want to focus on the functionality aspect, so we will use a library including basic styled components as buttons, lists, icons, menus, forms, and many more. It can be seen as a Twitter Bootstrap for React Native.

There are several popular UI libraries, NativeBase and React Native elements being the two most popular and best supported. Out of these two, we will choose NativeBase, since it's documentation is slightly clearer for beginners.

You can find the detailed documentation on how NativeBase works on their website (https://docs.nativebase.io/), but we will go through the basics of installing and using some of their components in this chapter. We previously installed native-base as a dependency of our project through npm install but NativeBase includes some peer dependencies, which need to be linked and included in our iOS and Android native folders. Luckily, React Native already has a tool for finding out those dependencies and linking them; we just need to run:

react-native link

At this point, we have all the UI components from NativeBase fully available in our app. So, we can start building our first screen.