Building an Editor by Sharing Code Between Android, iOS, and Web with React Native

When WordPress began rolling out the powerful new Gutenberg editor for building web pages (and, soon, entire websites), we were excited to bring that power to our users on mobile.

Why React Native

We know firsthand how hard it is to make a great editor. We have built native editors for Android and iOS before (andbefore). In addition, it was going to be extremely difficult to keep up with the work on the web version of the editor: the web editor had a substantial head start, and there is a larger community of developers contributing to Gutenberg on the web.

Gutenberg on the web is built with React, so we saw React Native as a way for mobile to leverage all of the work being done to create a great editor on the web.

Not only would reusing code from the web allow us to move…