For Web developers, making the jump to building full-fledged smartphone apps can be daunting. Facebook could ease the transition with a newly open-sourced framework its engineers developed to build apps for Apple devices.

The React Native framework provides a way to build app user interfaces for Apple iOS devices using JavaScript, a programming language well-known to many Web developers.

“What we’ve found is that when we build with React, our code is a lot more predictable. This predictability makes it so we can iterate more quickly with confidence, and our applications are a lot more reliable as a result,” wrote Tom Occhino, Facebook software engineer in a post announcing the release during the company’s F8 conference, ending Thursday.

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