5 Easy-to-Use React Native Calendar Libraries
Tags: reactnative, programming
Published: 2021-12-15 16:28:04

When building an application,


 you may need to allow your users to select a date or time for something to happen.
To input the date, it’s a good idea to use a calendar picker. A calendar picker is a component used to accept date and time inputs. It lets users select present, past, or future dates with an interactive calendar.

In this post, we’ll take a look at a few easy-to-use React Native calendar pickers, and then cover how to interact with the users’ on-device calendars. We’ll also walk through an example of how to build a simple app to remember your friends’ birthdays.
Before we get started, let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using a calendar picker in your app.

##Why You Should Use a Calendar Picker

###User Interface
A calendar picker is a dedicated UI component for date and time input. A calendar picker offers an interactive calendar that users of your app can use to select dates. Users can select year, month, and day from the calendar.
In addition, a calendar picker delivers a visually appealing UI. Some calendar pickers provide a clean modal that is dismissed after a user selects the date. This saves space for other elements on the screen.

###Nature of the Input
A calendar picker provides a more standard format for the data a user will input. For example, users don’t have to worry about whether they’re expected to specify the value for the day before the month. Using a calendar picker eliminates any room for this kind of inconsistency in the nature of the input.

###User Experience
Calendar picker leads to a better overall user experience. For instance, most React Native calendar pickers use native platform date input components that users are already familiar with.
Pulling out the virtual keyboard to input the date and time involves more steps. Hence, numeric controls can be painful and slow on mobile.
Now let’s take a look at some React Native calendar pickers.

###Easy-to-Use React Native Calendar Pickers

In this section, we’ll discuss five React Native calendar pickers that are very easy to use. The pickers on our list here are listed in no particular order.

###React Native CalendarPicker
First on our list is [React Native CalendarPicker](https://github.com/stephy/CalendarPicker) by Stephani Bishop. The library provides a simple third-party React Native calendar picker component.
Some of the things that make this library easy to use are the following:

- The library is supported in Expo Go.
- It’s easy to implement. All you need to do is add a CalendarPicker component to your view.
- The library is in active development.

With this package, users can pick dates using an interactive touch calendar with options for users to pick the year, month, and day.


###React Native Calendars

The next calendar picker we’ll be discussing is React Native Calendars. React Native Calendars is a collection of customizable React Native calendar components. The components include the following:
- Calendar component
- CalendarList component
- Agenda component

This module can be added to any React Native project with two easy steps.
First, install the module, then add the specific component you’re interested in.
This library offers a touch-based calendar that’s highly customizable. It also has support for multiple languages, including English, French, and Spanish.
React Native Calendars does not support Expo Go. However, it can be used with [EAS Build](https://docs.expo.dev/build/introduction/) and [custom clients](https://docs.expo.dev/clients/introduction/).

###React Native Modal Datetime Picker
[React Native Modal Datetime Picker](https://github.com/mmazzarolo/react-native-modal-datetime-picker) is a cross-platform calendar picker for React Native. The library includes a calendar picker component and a time picker component.
The calendar picker for this library is presented inside a modal, which looks and feels like native modals for iOS and Android.
React Native Modal Datetime is easy to install and supports projects created with [Expo CLI](https://docs.expo.io/workflow/expo-cli/) and bare React Native projects.