Square Reader SDK for React Native

It’s possible to get an app up and running locally within five minutes. I was even able to get a custom keypad, entering arbitrary values, in an hour (granted, I was a little rusty on my React Native when I was trying it). I’m also very much not a mobile developer, and having the application running on an iPhone and Android simulator simultaneously was so powerful for having a responsive feedback loop when developing. You can enable live reloading on each device and have all your changes reflected immediately upon saving.

Let’s say you take our quick-start app out for a spin and are looking to just get your feet wet in making your own point of sale app.

Then add some additional buttons that look like this:

and add a currentValue array to the state of our CheckoutScreen component:

You now have your own keypad to enter amounts to charge.

Here you can see what a final custom keypad looks like. We have buttons for every number, we can clear values, and we’re just storing the current value we want to charge in the main CheckoutScreen component. The state even persists if we back out of the charge.

It’s so easy to modify these interfaces! You can change the text, add in some additional state, or create custom functions to tailor the application to do whatever you need. The key benefit here is that you can then deploy this to iOS and Android using the same core components.

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