title: Is there a way to make React Native custom components without UI?
body: <p>I am writing a custom component for a Windows 8.1 tablet application our team are mostly developing in React Native.</p>
  
  <p>I've realised that some of the custom code we need doesn't naturally belong to any specific UI element. For example, we want a button to trigger the native Camera UI dialog (as in <a href="https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/CameraCaptureUI-Sample-845a53ac" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this CameraUICapture element sample</a>). However, there's no reason this would necessarily be triggered from a button. It could be a callback from something else, it could be a click event on an image. I don't want to lock the function calls to a specific UI piece.</p>
  
  <p>All the tutorials and demos I have managed to find so far for React Custom Components are explicitly for UI pieces, and require implementing a React View manager subclass to interact with React when the piece is loaded. Is this the only way to write native code accessible from a React page? Do I need at least a dummy UI element even to hook into functional code in the native layer, or is there another way?</p>