Introduction

After working on multiple mobile projects with React Native, I've arrived at a structure that works really well for teams of different sizes. In this post, I'm going to share that experience.

The problem with traditional structures

Most tutorials teach you to organize your code by file type:

src/
├── components/
├── screens/
├── hooks/
├── services/
└── utils/

This works for small projects, but scales very poorly. When you have 50+ components, finding what you're looking for becomes a nightmare.

The solution: Feature-First Architecture

The idea is simple: organize code by functionality, not by file type.

src/
├── features/
│   ├── auth/
│   │   ├── components/
│   │   ├── hooks/
│   │   ├── screens/
│   │   └── services/
│   ├── profile/
│   └── feed/
├── shared/
│   ├── components/
│   ├── hooks/
│   └── utils/
└── navigation/

Advantages

1. Cohesion: Everything related to a feature stays together
2. Scalability: Adding features doesn't increase complexity
3. Onboarding: New devs understand the structure quickly
4. Testing: Easy to test features in isolation

Golden rules

Shared code goes in shared/, specific code goes in its feature.

Some rules I follow:

• A feature never imports from another feature directly
• If two features need the same thing, it goes to shared/
• Each feature has its own barrel file (index.ts)

Practical example

Let's say we have an app with authentication. This is how the feature would look:

// features/auth/hooks/useLogin.ts
export const useLogin = () => {
  const [loading, setLoading] = useState(false);
  
  const login = async (email: string, password: string) => {
    setLoading(true);
    try {
      const user = await authService.login(email, password);
      return user;
    } finally {
      setLoading(false);
    }
  };
  
  return { login, loading };
};

Conclusion

There's no perfect structure that works for every project. What matters is having consistency and documenting your decisions.

If you want to see this architecture in action, you can check out some of my projects on GitHub.

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Have questions? Feel free to reach out in the contact section!