Jul 17 2026: Issue 17

react-native-skia-lab is a showcase of advanced React Native Skia techniques, featuring interactive demos for shaders, gestures, physics, painting, pixel manipulation, and polygon rendering. While it isn't a library release, it serves as a valuable reference for implementing high-performance graphics, animations, and creative UI experiences in React Native.

VisionCamera 5.1 adds support for scanning barcodes from static images with the new scanCodesInImage(...) API, expands camera device selection (including better default and external camera support), and improves Android camera metadata reporting. It also includes numerous stability fixes for metering, recording, zoom, orientation handling, and Pixel Formats, making it a solid upgrade for production camera apps.

Reanimated 4.5.1 is a maintenance release focused on stability, fixing crashes in useAnimatedKeyboard, callback recursion, CSS animations, and Android SVG rendering. It also improves web compatibility, animation reliability under iOS Reduce Motion, and Android build performance through better compiler cache reuse.

React Native Worklets 0.11 introduces experimental support for evaluating worklets from Hermes bytecode in Legacy Eval Mode, providing an opt-in workaround for the Hermes V1 memory issue in production builds. The release also improves HMR reliability, Expo tree-shaking compatibility, and fixes several runtime, Babel, and build configuration issues.

React Native Screens 4.26.1 is a small maintenance release for React Native 0.84+ that fixes Android Stack v4 window inset handling and resolves SplitView rendering issues on iOS after transitions. It also improves package compatibility by relaxing the React Native peer dependency configuration.

React Native Keyboard Controller 1.22.1 improves the reliability of KeyboardAwareScrollView, fixing edge cases on iOS 15 and earlier as well as compatibility issues with OTP input fields. If your app relies on keyboard-aware forms, this update delivers more consistent behavior with no API changes.

React Native Skia 2.7 introduces an optional synchronous mode for Surface.flush(), giving developers more control over rendering when needed. The release also improves Web rendering and WebGL context management, fixes image snapshot issues on iOS and Android, and adds support for high color depth displays.

Metro 0.87 improves bundling performance with up to 5% faster cold builds by optimizing require handling. It also aligns with React Native and Expo by enabling optional dependency resolution by default, while expanding experimental ES module support with better handling of namespace re-exports and export resolution.

React Native Windows 0.84 brings support for React Native 0.84 and requires Visual Studio 2026. The release improves Fabric with new onClick/onAuxClick events, imperative view.focus() support, better theming and focus behavior, and several rendering and reliability improvements for custom components.

Unistyles 3.3 adds support for React Navigation's inactive screen behavior, improving styling consistency during navigation transitions. The release also introduces native parsing for transformOrigin and Android background images, updates Nitro to v0.36.1, and includes several fixes for web and testing.

React Navigation 7.21.7 is a bug-fix release that improves navigation state consistency, resolving issues with layout-effect navigation, beforeRemove listeners, nested navigation groups, and consecutive reset actions. It also adds stricter validation for navigator state passed through route params, making navigation behavior more predictable.

Legend List 3.3.2 focuses on performance, reducing unnecessary re-renders by updating recycled rows without recreating their container context during scrolling. It also optimizes internal signal subscriptions, resulting in smoother list performance and lower overhead in large or highly dynamic lists.

React Native Maps 1.29 adds Fabric support for Google Maps Marker and Polygon on iOS, bringing these components into React Native's New Architecture. This improves compatibility with Fabric-based apps and marks another step toward full New Architecture support.

Nitro 0.35.11 is a maintenance release focused on improving runtime stability, with fixes for Swift concurrency, C++ promise synchronization, and thread pool synchronization. While there are no new APIs, the update makes Nitro Modules more reliable under concurrent workloads and production use.

Sentry React Native 8.18 introduces experimental APIs to extend the app start trace, allowing developers to include post-initialization work for more accurate startup performance metrics. The release also switches iOS to using a prebuilt Sentry.xcframework by default for faster installs, though some projects may need to opt back into the previous CocoaPods source build.

React Native MMKV 4.3.2 introduces reactive storage updates with the new checkContentChanged() API, making it easier to keep hooks in sync across app instances. The release also adds a configurable recovery strategy, reports external memory usage for better debugging, and includes support for React Native 0.87.

Sentry React Native 8.18 introduces experimental APIs to extend app startup tracing, making it possible to measure initialization work that happens after the app launches. The release also switches iOS to prebuilt Sentry.xcframework binaries by default, reducing build times, although projects with custom CocoaPods setups may require additional migration steps.

React Native Toast Message 2.4 adds configurable enter and exit animations through the new animationConfig API, making it easier to customize toast transitions. The release also enhances the onShow callback by passing ToastShowParams, giving developers more context when a toast is displayed.

Building a ChatGPT-Style AI Chat App in React Native with RAG & Streaming - Margelo walks through building a ChatGPT-like AI app in React Native using native WebSockets, RAG with Pinecone, Liquid Glass, Reanimated, Skia, and native markdown rendering to achieve a truly native feel. The article is packed with practical implementation details, performance techniques, and production-ready patterns for building smooth AI experiences in React Native.

How Wellspoken Grew to Hundreds of Thousands of Users - Liam Du shares how Wellspoken scaled from 400 users to hundreds of thousands of downloads by combining ASO, creator marketing, relentless A/B testing, and a strong product. The article also highlights how Expo, EAS Build, and OTA Updates enabled rapid iteration and production fixes without maintaining native build infrastructure.

How to Build Mobile Apps with AI: The Three Tools That Actually Matter - Expo breaks down a practical AI workflow for mobile development, covering skills, MCP servers, and context management. The article explains how to build faster with AI while avoiding common pitfalls like context bloat and overusing MCPs.

Building Balanced Mobile Layouts: Nesting Tabs and Drawers with Expo Router - Learn how to combine drawers and bottom tabs in Expo Router using a clean file-based routing structure, with practical guidance on theming, gesture handling, and navigation architecture. The article also covers common trade-offs and patterns for building scalable navigation layouts.

TypeScript 7 is finally here, bringing a major performance boost with its new Go-based compiler. The release delivers faster builds, improved editor responsiveness, and a more efficient watch mode, making day-to-day development noticeably smoother.

Rewriting Rive React Native with Nitro Modules - Margelo rebuilt the Rive React Native SDK on Nitro Modules, unlocking a more natural object-based API alongside major performance gains. The rewrite delivers up to 94× faster multi-view rendering, lower memory usage, and faster property updates through reusable native objects

How Teamworks Cut Mobile Release Time to 10 Minutes - Learn how Callstack helped Teamworks replace a monolithic release process with Re.Pack and Module Federation, enabling independent mini-app deployments. The new architecture reduced release times from days to minutes while improving scalability, caching, and production observability.

Closing the Agent Loop: Autonomous React Native Bug Reproduction with Argent - See how Argent autonomously reproduces React Native bugs by controlling the iOS Simulator, authenticating, navigating the app, collecting evidence, and generating a structured report. The workflow shows how AI can take a GitHub issue from reproduction to verification with minimal human involvement

Kotlin Multiplatform vs React Native: A Performance Comparison — Software Mansion compares identical apps built with Kotlin Multiplatform and React Native, measuring app size, startup time, memory, and CPU across Android and iOS. The benchmarks show KMP leading on Android, React Native excelling in iOS memory efficiency, and both frameworks making different performance trade-offs depending on the platform.

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🎙️Simon Grimm - WHY I STILL USE RN in 2026

🎙️Traversy Media - React Native Crash Course 2026 - Build a Complete Mobile App

Chime - React Native Engineer

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Shakepay - Staff Engineer (React Native)

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Tether.io - React Native Engineer