Complete React Native Course — The Net Ninja

This is the Net Ninja's current React Native series, and it is a real course rather than a loose pile of videos: 29 lessons, a little over five hours in total, recorded in 2025 against Expo and Expo Router. Each episode builds on the one before it, and by the end you have a working book-tracking app with accounts, a database and live-updating data.

Shaun Pelling's format has not changed in a decade and does not need to. Lessons run five to twenty minutes, the editor is large, nothing gets typed without being said out loud first, and there is no intro music to skip. If you have bounced off longer bootcamp-style videos, this pacing is the reason to try again.

What you build

One app, developed across the whole series. The first third is interface work - Text, View and Image, themed light and dark components, a Pressable-based button, tab navigation with icons, and safe area handling. The middle third wires up Appwrite as a backend: signup and login forms, an auth context, error states, persisted sessions, and route protection so signed-out users cannot reach the app's interior. The last third is the data layer - creating, listing, opening and deleting book records, rendered through FlatList and kept in sync with Appwrite's real-time subscriptions.

Where it is strongest

• Expo Router. File-based navigation, stack layouts, route groups and nested layouts get their own run of episodes early on, which is the right emphasis - this is the part of modern React Native that most trips up people arriving from React on the web.
• Theming. Light and dark mode arrives in episode five rather than being bolted on at the end, so the themed-component pattern is established before there is much code to retrofit.
• Auth done properly. Seven consecutive episodes (#13-#19) on authentication is more than most free courses spend, and they cover the unglamorous parts: surfacing error messages, restoring session state on launch, and gating routes.

What it does not cover

There is no testing, no push notifications, no offline handling, and nothing about submitting to the App Store or Play Store - the series ends at "delete a book", not at "ship a product". State management stays on React Context throughout, so if you are weighing Redux, Zustand or TanStack Query you will need another source. Native modules and anything needing a custom development build are out of scope; you stay inside managed Expo the entire time.

The Appwrite dependency is worth thinking about before you start. It is a reasonable pick and the free tier covers the course, but a sizeable block of the series is Appwrite-specific, and that part does not transfer if your real project uses Supabase, Firebase or your own API. The React Native half transfers completely.

Who it's for

Developers who know JavaScript and some React and want a guided first mobile app rather than a reference manual. It suits people who learn by typing along. It suits you less if you want architectural trade-offs - Pelling shows you a good pattern and moves on rather than comparing it against the alternatives.

Our take

The best free structured React Native series currently going, largely because of when it was recorded. React Native's setup story changes every year and most highly-ranked tutorials describe a toolchain that no longer exists; this one is on Expo Router and still close enough to current that the commands you type will actually work. One honest warning: view counts fall from roughly 349,000 on episode one to about 11,000 on episode 29. That gap says nothing about the teaching, but it says plenty about how much more intent it takes to finish a 29-part series than to start one.