React Native — Set Up Your Environment

Documentation is not a course, and React Native's docs are refreshingly honest about that. The page invites you to read straight through like a book or to jump to whatever you need, and it tells you plainly that the setup instructions have moved elsewhere — to the environment setup section — which is a small thing that saves a lot of confusion.

Maintained by Meta Open Source and the wider community, this is the only reference that is never wrong about what an API currently does. Every course, video and blog post on this list is downstream of it, and most of them are a version or two behind.

How the docs are organised

The Basics section covers core components, React fundamentals, text input, ScrollView, list views, platform-specific code and troubleshooting. From there it fans out into environment setup, running on a device, styling, debugging, testing and performance, then down into the JavaScript runtime, Codegen and native module development. That last tier is where you end up when something breaks in a way no tutorial anticipated.

The pages embed Snack Players — Expo's in-browser runner — so you can edit an example and watch it render for iOS and Android without installing anything. It's the best part of the whole site and easy to miss.

How it differs from a course

Docs explain what an API does. They rarely explain why you'd choose it, and almost never explain what to do when two reasonable options conflict. React Native's docs are a strong reference and a weak teacher: there's no project, no ordering that builds toward something, and the difficulty curve jumps without warning from styling a Text element to Codegen and the New Architecture.

There's also a persistent framing problem. The docs cover bare React Native while most people in practice use Expo, and the seam between the two is where beginners get stuck — a doc page assumes bare workflow, your project isn't, and nothing tells you that's the mismatch.

Who it's for — and who should skip it

Everyone building React Native should have this open in a tab permanently. As a first resource it works only if you already know React and are comfortable learning from reference material without a guide.

If you're new to mobile entirely, start with the Expo tutorial or a structured video course and come back here the first time a tutorial's answer doesn't match your behaviour. That's what docs are for.

Our take

Indispensable, and not a course no matter how the directory categorises it. Our real complaint is coverage of the New Architecture and native modules, which is dense, assumes native platform knowledge, and is the section people most need help with. Use it as the arbiter of truth, not as your teacher.