March 6 2026: Issue 14

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🎉 Expo SDK 55 is Out!
Expo SDK 55 has been released with React Native 0.83 and React 19.2, bringing a large set of improvements across performance, tooling, and native capabilities. This release officially drops support for the Legacy Architecture, moving Expo projects fully to React Native’s New Architecture.

The default project template has been redesigned with a new /src folder structure and Native Tabs API for a more platform-native experience on iOS and Android. SDK 55 also introduces Hermes v1 (opt-in) and Hermes bytecode diffing, which can significantly reduce OTA update sizes and improve update performance.

This release also expands AI tooling for Expo developers, improves brownfield integrations, and adds new native capabilities in Expo Router, along with updates across many Expo modules and developer tools.

🎉 Expo Router v55: More Native Navigation, Better Web Support
Expo Router v55 brings major improvements to navigation and web capabilities, making it easier to build truly native experiences with a shared codebase.

This release introduces a new declarative Stack API, allowing developers to configure headers, titles, and search bars directly inside React components. It also adds Native Tabs, native iOS toolbars, dynamic platform colors, and Apple zoom transitions for smoother, more native navigation.

On the web side, Router v55 expands support with expo-server, enabling server APIs, configurable headers, and experimental server-side rendering (SSR) and data loaders for better performance and SEO.

The release also includes experimental Split View support for larger screens like iPad, bringing more advanced layout capabilities to Expo apps.

🎉 State of React Native 2025
The State of React Native 2025 survey highlights a major milestone for the ecosystem. The New Architecture has now reached around 80% adoption, unlocking better performance and enabling many modern libraries built around JSI, Fabric, and TurboModules.

The ecosystem continues to mature, with improvements across debugging, tooling, and developer experience, addressing many of the biggest pain points reported in previous surveys.

The survey also serves as a valuable resource for developers to understand current trends, popular libraries, and best practices, while helping maintainers and contributors guide the future direction of the React Native ecosystem based on real community feedback.

📦 uniwind - recently released v1.0.0-rc.5, introducing new theme transition animations such as SlideLeftToRight, CircleCenter, and other circular transitions, along with web theme transitions using the View Transition API. The update also adds tvOS and TV focus selectors (tv:, android-tv:, apple-tv:), expanding platform support beyond mobile.

Recent releases also introduced Scoped Themes, allowing developers to apply themes to specific parts of the component tree without affecting the global theme. Under the hood, Uniwind continues to upgrade its Nitro Modules integration, improve stability across Android and web builds, and fix performance issues such as memory leaks and shadow tree updates.

📦 react-native-enriched v0.5.0 introduces several improvements to the rich text editor across both platforms. The release adds lineHeight support for iOS and Android, improving typography control, and introduces custom context menu items, allowing developers to extend the editor’s native editing actions.

The update also adds HTML normalization on both iOS and Android for more consistent content handling, along with a new removeLink API for managing links inside the editor. On the maintenance side, the library drops support for React Native 0.79 and 0.80 and removes the deprecated onChangeStateDeprecated API.

📦 react-native-brownfield - Callstack released a new React Native Brownfield Migration skill that provides a structured workflow for incrementally adding React Native to existing native apps. It guides developers through setup with @callstack/react-native-brownfield, packaging RN artifacts (XCFramework/AAR), and integrating React Native features screen-by-screen into host iOS and Android apps.

The skill also separates Expo and bare React Native migration paths, helping teams choose the correct setup and safely roll out React Native inside large production apps.

📦 rnrepo now adds iOS support, bringing its React Native build acceleration plugin to both major platforms. The tool speeds up builds by using pre-built React Native artifacts, significantly reducing native build times. Setup is simple: developers only need to add a few lines to their project configuration, and RNRepo will handle fetching and using the optimized binaries for faster builds.

📦 native-html/render continues evolving as a flexible solution for rendering HTML content directly in React Native apps. The library translates HTML markup into native views while remaining lightweight and highly customizable. It supports custom renderers, tag-level styling, DOM manipulation, and CSS processing, making it well suited for rendering CMS content, articles, and structured HTML inside mobile apps without relying on a WebView.

📦 react-native-nitro-version-check is a new version-checking library for React Native built on Nitro Modules. It’s designed as a modern replacement for the unmaintained react-native-version-check, providing faster access to app version, build number, package name, and install source.The library also supports App Store and Play Store version lookups, granular update checks (major, minor, patch), and install source detection such as TestFlight or sideloaded apps, while remaining lightweight with pure Swift and Kotlin implementations.

📖 The Future of Video in React Native: Moving from expo-av to expo-video
A new article from Software Mansion explains the migration from expo-av to the new expo-video API introduced in Expo SDK 55. The update splits the old monolithic <Video /> component into VideoPlayer (logic) and VideoView (UI), aligning React Native video handling with native media architectures.

The new API also introduces synchronous playback methods and event-based state updates, replacing the heavy onPlaybackStatusUpdate pattern from expo-av and improving performance and developer control over video playback.

📖 How Vercel Built the v0 iOS App with React Native + Expo
Vercel shared a deep technical breakdown of how they built the v0 iOS app using React Native and Expo. The team focused on delivering a highly native chat experience, combining libraries like LegendList, React Native Reanimated, and react-native-keyboard-controller to achieve smooth message animations, streaming responses, and precise keyboard handling.

The article also highlights how Vercel used native menus, Liquid Glass UI, and custom patches to React Native, while sharing backend APIs between web and mobile using OpenAPI and TanStack Query.

📖 Home screen widgets and Live Activities in Expo
Expo introduced expo-widgets, a new library that lets developers build iOS home screen widgets and Live Activities using React components. The library relies on Expo UI and Continuous Native Generation to handle all the native setup automatically, removing the need for manual SwiftUI extensions or Xcode configuration.

Widgets and Live Activities are defined as React components that render to SwiftUI primitives behind the scenes, enabling React Native apps to ship native iOS widgets and Dynamic Island updates without writing native code.

📖 The Future of Video in React Native: Moving from expo-av to expo-video
A new article from Software Mansion explores the migration from expo-av to the new expo-video API introduced with Expo SDK 55. The update replaces the monolithic <Video /> component with a clearer architecture built around VideoPlayer for playback logic and VideoView for UI rendering.

The new system introduces synchronous playback controls and event-based state updates, improving performance and eliminating the heavy onPlaybackStatusUpdate pattern used in expo-av.

📖 Ship smaller OTA updates: bundle diffing comes to EAS Update in SDK 55
Expo SDK 55 introduces bundle diffing for EAS Update, allowing devices to download small binary patches instead of full bundles when updates are published. In many cases, this reduces OTA update size by up to 75%, significantly improving update speed and lowering bandwidth usage.

The feature works by generating patches between update versions using the bsdiff algorithm, so devices only fetch what actually changed rather than the entire JavaScript bundle.

💬 Got questions or want to chat? DM me on X @adnansahinovich or visit nativeweekly.com for weekly React Native digest. See ya next time!