One-to-one communication is the main use for mobile phones although, text messaging has been quickly replaced by direct messaging apps. In this chapter, we will build a messaging app in React Native with the support of Firebase, a mobile backend as a service that will free us from having to build a whole backend for our app. Instead, we will focus on handling the state of our app fully from the frontend. Of course, this may have security implications that need to be eventually tackled, but to keep the focus of this book on React Native's capabilities, we will stick with the approach of keeping all the logic inside our app.
Firebase is a real-time database built on self-synching collections of data, it plays very well with MobX, so we will use it again for controlling the state of our app. But in this chapter, we will dive deeper as we will build larger data stores, which will be injected in our component tree through the mobx-react connectors.
We will build the app...