Native & Components

react-native is different from the WebView based approaches for app development. In react-native the components are converted to actual native components and that is why the components are not web, but a specific set of components that can map to the specific native corresponding components.

Component mapping for primitive components

Usually the transition from react for the web to react-native is quite intuitive as the only thing that changes is the tags that are used. The semantics of <View /> is a reference to the native part in react-native as mobile app frameworks have the view as the central primitive. What this means in practice is that any UI can be built as a hierarchy of <View />s.