Enhancing Usability for Real-Estate Agents using Community Driven React-Native

Abstract

Mobile application development has been around for quite a few years now. In almost every domain, daily activities and day-to-day tasks are managed using mobile applications that make life of users easier. However, in the real-estate sector, most of the work has been handled manually using spreadsheets or involving paperwork. To resolve this problem, an indigenous application to be developed for real estate agents is the primary goal of this research. Moreover, choosing a development framework is always crucial when starting a project. In mobile apps, there are two main operating systems: Android and the other iOS. One option is to develop applications separately for both operating systems, and another is to build a hybrid application that is a mixture of web technologies like CSS, HTML, and native technologies. However, it has its pros and cons, which are also discussed in this research. In the last few years, a new way of development has been introduced, i.e., Cross-platform mobile application development, which means that just writing one code-based application can be deployed to Android and iOS. There are many cross-platform frameworks, so choosing the best is also part of this research. React native, developed by Facebook, is considered the primary framework for application development. To find out if it is a good fit for development and better than other frameworks, i.e., Xamarin. Two separate applications are developed using React Native and Xamarin, and results are evaluated using a performance matrix and questionnaire survey approach filled by the real estate agents. Results concluded that Real estate agents were able to increase their productivity & usability by 79.3% using Community Driven React Native.