Harvard University
CS50's Mobile App Development with React Native
Harvard's React Native course with Jordan Hayashi — strong JavaScript and React lectures, but officially retired since June 2020 and badly dated on mobile.
Intermediate10+ hours
Learn Mobile Development with the Mobile Development tutorials and online courses.
Getting software onto a phone means dealing with small screens, touch, permissions, offline states and two app stores that both have opinions. The framework you choose decides how much of that you handle yourself. Cross-platform tools let you write once and ship to both; native tools give you everything the platform can do, twice.
Our shelf leans hard toward cross-platform, and we'd rather say so up front than let you find out three clicks in. Of the ten tutorials here, eight are React Native and two are Flutter.
Expo Tutorial: Build Your First Universal App is the fastest route to something running on your own phone — two hours, one app, iOS and Android and web at once. If you want a course rather than a tutorial, Learn React Native — Codecademy is browser-checked with six projects, free to work through, though the certificate needs a paid plan. From Flutter's side, Google's Write Your First Flutter App is now eighteen steps across three apps and goes further than its name suggests — widgets and DevTools through ChangeNotifier state, slivers and adaptive layout.
Read the labels here carefully. The Meta React Native Specialization is eight Coursera courses ending in a capstone, and there's no audit option — a seven-day trial or financial aid, then a subscription. Codecademy is free to learn but paid to certify. Everything else costs nothing, including React Native Express, Devin Abbott's book-style guide, which reads better than most paid material but carries no last-updated date anywhere.
Ten entries, two of which we list with a warning. CS50's Mobile App Development with React Native has excellent JavaScript and React lectures from Jordan Hayashi, but Harvard retired it in June 2020 and the mobile-specific parts show it badly. The Net Ninja series is clear teaching, but check the video dates against whatever Expo shipped this month. The real hole is native: nothing on Swift or SwiftUI, nothing on Kotlin or Jetpack Compose, and only two Flutter entries with a two-hour codelab at one end and a 37-hour marathon at the other.
If you already know React, React Native is a two-week detour rather than a new career. If you know neither, Flutter's tooling story is calmer — but our Flutter shelf is thin enough that you'll be reading Google's docs unaided within a week.
Harvard University
Harvard's React Native course with Jordan Hayashi — strong JavaScript and React lectures, but officially retired since June 2020 and badly dated on mobile.
Expo's official two-hour tutorial: build StickerSmash across iOS, Android and web with Expo Router, gestures, modals and image picking.
freeCodeCamp
Vandad Nahavandipoor's 37-hour Flutter course — Dart from scratch through Firebase auth, Firestore, Bloc state management and store submission.
Codecademy
Codecademy's Expo-based React Native course: browser-checked lessons and six projects. Free to learn, but the certificate needs a paid plan.
Meta on Coursera
Meta's eight-course Coursera path from JavaScript basics to a React Native capstone. You cannot audit it free — only a 7-day trial or financial aid.
Devin Abbott
Devin Abbott's readable, book-style guide to React Native — JavaScript through native modules. Clearly structured, but carries no last-updated date.
Meta Open Source
The official React Native reference — core components, styling, debugging, Codegen and native modules, with in-browser Snack examples on most pages.
Programming with Mosh
Mosh Hamedani's polished two-hour React Native intro: components, Flexbox layout and debugging. Ends before navigation, data or state management.
The Net Ninja
The Net Ninja's short-lesson React Native series with a companion GitHub repo — clear teaching, but check the video dates against current Expo tooling.
Google Flutter Team
Google's official Flutter pathway — now eighteen steps and three apps, from widgets and DevTools through ChangeNotifier state, slivers and adaptive layouts.