Welcome to the second lesson of the Core Components in React Native course! In our previous lesson, you built a Space Docking Notification Card, where you learned to use core components like View, Text, Image, and TouchableOpacity to create a practical notification UI. Now, we’ll take your skills further by building a space FM player — a music player interface for your interstellar journey. This lesson will focus on combining React Native’s core components to create a clean, functional, and visually appealing player. By the end, you’ll see how these building blocks come together to form a more complex, real-world interface.

To build the space FM player, we’ll use several essential React Native components. Some, like View, Text, and TouchableOpacity, will be familiar from the previous lesson (consider this a quick review). Others, such as ScrollView and StatusBar, will be introduced here for the first time.

Let’s start with the basic structure. The View component is used to group and arrange other components, while Text displays the lyrics and track information. To handle long lyrics that might not fit on the screen, we’ll use ScrollView, which allows users to scroll through content vertically. For the player controls, we’ll use TouchableOpacity to create custom, tappable buttons. The Image component is used for icons and artwork.

Here’s a minimal example showing how these components fit together:

In this example, the ScrollView wraps the lyrics, the track info is grouped in a View, and the controls are represented by a button. This structure forms the foundation of our player.

To create a polished, immersive experience, it’s important to control the appearance of the device’s status bar and ensure your content is displayed within the safe area of the device (avoiding notches and system UI). The StatusBar component lets you set the style of the status bar (for example, light text on a dark background), and SafeAreaView ensures your UI doesn’t overlap with device edges.

Here’s how you can set up your app to use these components, along with the player:

• StatusBar with barStyle='light-content' ensures the status bar text/icons are light, matching the dark background.
• SafeAreaView wraps the player and sets the background color, keeping content within safe device boundaries.
• useKeepAwake (from expo-keep-awake) is optional, but it prevents the screen from sleeping while the player is open.

Building a music player interface comes with a few common challenges. One is handling long blocks of text, such as song lyrics. If you simply use a Text component, the content might overflow the screen. By wrapping the lyrics in a ScrollView, you allow users to scroll through the text smoothly.

Another challenge is organizing the layout so that the lyrics, track information, and controls are easy to find and use. Using nested View components and applying styles helps keep everything clear and visually appealing. For example, you might want the lyrics to take up most of the screen, with the track info and controls anchored at the bottom.

Here’s a snippet that demonstrates how to use ScrollView for lyrics and arrange the controls:

The ScrollView ensures the lyrics are scrollable, and the controls are placed in a horizontal row at the bottom. This approach keeps the interface organized and user-friendly.

Let’s put everything together and walk through a more complete example. We’ll use styles to polish the look, nest Text components to highlight different lyric sections, and add custom player controls.

In this lesson, you learned how to combine React Native’s core components to build a functional and attractive music player interface. We reviewed familiar components like View, Text, and TouchableOpacity, and introduced new ones such as ScrollView and StatusBar. You saw how to solve common UI challenges, like handling long lyrics and organizing controls, and you followed a step-by-step example to assemble the space FM player.

This lesson builds directly on your experience with the notification card, showing how the same building blocks can be used in new and creative ways. Up next, you’ll get hands-on practice by building and customizing your own space FM player. This will help reinforce what you’ve learned and prepare you for even more advanced layouts in future lessons. Let’s get started!