Feb 6 2026: Issue 12

📦 react-native-screens improves navigation performance in React Native by using native primitives for screens, stacks, modals, and transitions. Version 4.21.0 adds better iOS xcassets support, early groundwork for the next native stack implementation, and delivers multiple important bug fixes for modals, screen sizing, and Android dev menu key events.

📦 react-native-teleport is a production-ready native portal solution for React Native that lets you render modals, overlays, and tooltips outside the normal UI tree without breaking context. It also introduces a powerful “move” operation, allowing components to be re-parented across screens without unmounting enabling seamless shared-element transitions and major performance optimizations.

📦 detox is a powerful end-to-end testing framework for React Native that lets you run automated UI tests on real devices and simulators with high reliability. Version 20.47.0 adds support for React Native 0.83, improves iOS 26 compatibility, introduces early semantic element matching, and includes fixes for Android permission handling and session configuration.

📦 agent-device is an experimental CLI tool from Callstack that lets AI agents (or developers) control iOS and Android simulators/devices through commands like tap, scroll, type, snapshot, and screenshot. It provides accessibility-tree inspection and session-based automation, making it a lightweight foundation for agent-driven mobile testing and interaction.

📦 react-native-nitro-mlx brings Apple’s MLX-powered on-device LLM generation into React Native through the Nitro bridge. Version 0.3.0 introduces full tool/function calling support, allowing models to invoke external functions during streaming, handle multiple calls per response, and automatically continue generation with results included in context.

📦 uniwind v1.3.0 introduces support for data attributes, unlocking more flexible conditional styling patterns similar to modern Tailwind web workflows. This release also fixes several important cross-platform issues on web, including broken disabled states, incorrect placeholder colors, image sizing bugs, and improved parsing of custom insets for more reliable layout behavior.

📦 voltra v1.1.0 is a major update that brings full Android widget support, making the library truly cross-platform for building React Native home screen widgets. This release also adds powerful iOS upgrades like a new Link component, iOS 18 supplemental activity variants, widget state scheduling over time, custom font loading, and key build fixes such as improved ESM compatibility for smoother EAS deployments.

📦 react-native-enriched v0.3.0 delivers a big round of editor improvements, adding new capabilities like setSelection, heading styles, onKeyPress support, and smarter link detection. This release also focuses heavily on stability and UX fixes across iOS and Android, including correct cursor positioning with images, better scrolling behavior, improved span handling, and multiple important Android text selection and paste fixes, plus an API transition around onChangeState.

📦 react-native-screens v4.20.0 improves Android FormSheet behavior by adding proper dynamic content sizing when fitToContents is enabled, fixing multiple height and overflow translation issues. This release also strengthens accessibility for bottom tabs, expands styling options for tab backgrounds, and introduces several experimental API renames as the new native stack implementation continues to evolve.

📦 react navigation 8.0 Alpha introduces a major step forward by making native bottom tabs the default, delivering a more platform-authentic look and feel powered by react-native-screens (including iOS 26’s new liquid glass effect). This release also brings big developer experience upgrades like smarter TypeScript inference, easier access to parent route/navigation state, a new pushParams API for history updates without new screens, improved theming with dynamic system colors, better deep-link handling for conditional flows, and built-in state persistence support.

📦 Expo AI Chatbot v2.0.0 is a major upgrade that moves the app to Expo SDK 54 with the new architecture enabled, delivering better performance and full modern Expo compatibility. This release also includes a major AI SDK 5 migration, adds powerful new product features like Incognito Mode and Long-Term Memory, and improves the LiveKit voice agent while making the web version work out of the box.

📦 react-native-bootsplash v7.0.0 is a major release that makes the library edge-to-edge by default on Android, ensuring splash screens fully match modern fullscreen UI layouts. It also improves Expo integration by generating splash assets automatically during prebuild, makes isVisible() synchronous for simpler logic, and adds a new --plist option for easier custom iOS Info.plist setups.

📦 react-native-builder-bob (create-react-native-library) v0.57.0 adds support for including an Expo example app when generating new native React Native libraries, making it much easier to test and showcase packages in the Expo ecosystem. This release also brings back the Microsoft test app setup, improving cross-platform validation for library authors.

📖 Tomasz J. Żelawski - Behind the Scenes of React Native Multithreading: Vision Camera V5 x React Native Worklets

📖 Jacob Clausen (Expo) - Channel surfing for Expo Updates: How to switch update channels at runtime

📖 Vercel - Best React Native Practices

📖 Dan Kelly (Expo) - 5 tips to increase mobile app downloads and retention in 2026Podcasts & Videos

📖 Mike Grabowski (Callstack) - Announcing AI SDK Profiler for React Native

📖 Oskar Kwaśniewski - Introducing Brownie: Type-Safe Shared State for React Native Brownfield Apps

🎙️ RNR 351 - Transforming Packages to Nitro with Marc Rousavy

🎥 First Look at Expo Widgets: iOS Widgets Without Native Code

🎥 Introducing Expo Brownfield Target – Automate Brownfield Setup in Your Expo App 🚀

Callstack - Senior Mobile C++ Engineer 📍Remote

Callstack - Senior Mobile Engineer 📍Remote

Distribusion - Senior React Native Engineer 📍Remote

Kraken - React Native Engineer 📍Remote

Orca - React Native Lead Engineer 📍Berlin

Orca - Senior Mobile Engineer 📍Berlin