Welcome to the first ever edition of React Native Wrapped! 2025 was a massive year React Native turned 10, the New Architecture became the default, and 1.0 finally appeared on the horizon. We'll go through the most important updates in the community and share some stats. Let's go!
React Native in numbers
The year of the New Architecture
Over 6 years in the making, we’ve finally reached the end of the transition off the bridge architecture. The core team, together with Expo, turned the New Architecture on by default in May. Four months later they pulled the plug on the old one. Long live the (not so new anymore) architecture!
AI app builders bet on React Native
React Native is chosen by companies building AI apps: Mistral, v0, Replit, vibecode, Rork. These apps are build with React Native and some of them allow users to build new React Native apps as well.
Best Expo apps
Expo App Awards launched this year and we want to share the best apps with you:
Tailwind race in React Native
2025 has turned into a Tailwind race for the React Native ecosystem (like NativeWind wasn’t enough!): at React Universe Conf the community just welcomed Uniwind, a high-performance Tailwind binding, promising faster class-based styling across iOS, Android, and web with minimal runtime overhead, positioning itself as a compelling alternative to long-standing solutions.
Not much later on, the react-native-tailwind library has gained traction by offering compile-time Tailwind integration via a Babel plugin, delivering zero runtime cost and tight TypeScript support for utility classes.
Adding even more momentum to this trend, Expo has signaled first-party support for native CSS and Tailwind-like styling during React Conf, aiming to bring a more seamless, web-style authoring experience to React Native developers out of the box.
Who will win in 2026? 👀
Month by month
With 7 major React Native releases and countless community contributions, 2025 was one of the busiest years in the framework's history. So much happened that it's easy to forget what landed when, so let’s jump down memory lane and revisit the biggest moments, month by month.
January
Five years of React Native at Shopify 🛒
Shopify published a retrospective on their 5-year journey with React Native. What started as an experiment is now powering their flagship Shop app and Point of Sale systems. Shopify is one of the biggest players in the React Native ecosystem, which is also contributing back to the community via many libraries, such as @shopify/react-native-skia or @shopify/flash-list.
React Native 0.77
The first release of 2025 landed with exciting CSS improvements: the display: contents, boxSizing, mixBlendMode, and outline properties. The release also prepared Android apps for the upcoming Android 15 edge-to-edge requirement and 16KB memory page size support for better performance. On the iOS side, the init template switched to a Swift-based AppDelegate, finally moving away from Objective-C after nearly 11 years!
February
React Native 0.78 — React 19 is here!
The biggest news of February: React 19 officially landed in React Native! Version 0.78 brought full React 19 support along with a simplified process to enable the React Compiler. This means better performance out of the box with less manual optimization work.
Nitro Views
Marc Rousavy introduced Nitro Views, a new way to create high-performance native views using the Nitro architecture. This laid the groundwork for a wave of Nitro-powered libraries that would emerge later in the year.
March
React Native turns 10! 🎂
The biggest celebration of the month: React Native turned 10 years old! Originally open-sourced in March 2015 at React.js Conf, the framework started as a Facebook hackathon project and has since grown to power millions of apps worldwide. From Instagram to Discord, from Shopify to Microsoft Office, the impact has been massive.
New React Native Framework by Callstack
At Callstack, we announced the new framework formerly named React Native Enterprise Framework (RNEF). Today, as some of you probably know, it’s called Rock. Rock comes with first-class support for brownfield, remote caching, and a CLI written from scratch.
Re.Pack 5.0 📦
The alternative bundler hit version 5.0 with massive improvements: 5x faster builds, reduced configuration, and NativeWind support. Re.Pack positions itself as a drop-in Metro replacement for teams looking to utilize Microfrontends with Module Federation on Mobile.
April
React Native 0.79: Speed boost everywhere
April's release was all about performance. Metro got a 3x faster cold startup and finally shipped package exports support. On Android, app startup times improved significantly by skipping JS bundle compression. The tooling is getting seriously fast.
Legend List 1.0
A new player appeared in the list virtualization space in React Native! Legend List hit 1.0 as a JS-only solution (back then!) for high-performance lists, built exclusively for the New Architecture. No native code required, just pure JavaScript leveraging synchronous layout APIs.
React Native AI 🤖
Callstack released React Native AI, a solution for running on-device LLMs in your React Native apps. With AI becoming essential for mobile experiences, this library makes it easy to integrate local AI models without sending data to the cloud.
May
Expo SDK 53
The most impressive Expo release of the year dropped in May! The headline feature: New Architecture is now enabled by default for all projects. No more opt-in flags. Other highlights include deploying development builds straight to TestFlight with a simple npx testflight command and 25% faster Android builds with prebuilt modules.
WebGPU comes to React Native
William Candillon announced "Game On", a Shopify-supported effort to bring modern WebGPU support (Vulkan and Metal) to React Native. This opens the door for high-performance 3D graphics, games, and GPU-accelerated computations directly in your RN apps.
React Native powers 600 million Office users
Microsoft published a deep dive on how they're using React Native to modernize the Office suite. The newest Copilot AI features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint? Built with React Native. That's 600 million users experiencing RN daily!
June
Freezing the Legacy Architecture 🥶
It's official: the React Native team announced plans to freeze the Legacy Architecture. No more new features, no more improvements, just maintenance mode until eventual removal. The message is clear: New Architecture is the only path forward.
React Native 0.80, Toward a Stable API
This milestone release focused on something crucial for the ecosystem's maturity: defining a stable JavaScript and TypeScript API. The "Moving Towards a Stable JavaScript API" initiative aims to give library authors and developers confidence that core APIs won't change unexpectedly. A big step toward React Native 1.0!
Nitro Week
Library developers fell in love with Nitro! In June, three major releases adopted the Nitro Modules:
- React Native Nitro Image — high-performance image handling
- React Native Video 7.0 — the popular video library, now Nitro-powered
- React Native HealthKit 9.0 — Apple Health integration rebuilt with Nitro
The trend is clear: more and more people are using Nitro for native modules.
July
Reanimated 4 Stable Release
The future of React Native animations arrived! Reanimated 4 went stable with a game-changing feature: CSS animations and transitions. In March, Software Mansion team created an RFC to discuss shape of the Worklets. With v4, Worklets are now extracted into a standalone package, so you can use them without Reanimated for any off-thread JavaScript execution.
Unistyles 3.0 🦄
Jacek Pudysz's styling library hit version 3.0 and went stable. Built in C++, Unistyles 3.0 brings surgical precision to style updates, it recomputes and updates only the necessary styles and components based on dependency changes. The result? Eliminated unnecessary re-renders and buttery-smooth UI performance.
August
FlashList v2
Shopify rewrote FlashList from the ground up! Version 2 drops the requirement for item size estimates, a common pain point for developers. By leveraging the New Architecture's synchronous layout measurements, FlashList v2 delivers blazing-fast lists with zero native code. The list virtualization race is heating up!
React Native 0.81
August's release brought Android 16 support with mandatory edge-to-edge displays. But the biggest improvement in this release was experimental precompiled iOS builds offering dramatically faster compile times. Developers reported significant speedups, a huge quality-of-life improvement for daily development.
Expo Launch
Expo introduced a new way to ship: deploy iOS apps to TestFlight straight from the web. No Xcode required, no complex CI setup - just push and go. The path from code to App Store keeps getting shorter.
September
React Universe Conf
The biggest news dropped at React Universe Conf in Wrocław: Jorge Cohen from Meta announced that React Native 1.0 is on the horizon! After 10 years and countless improvements, the framework is finally heading toward a stable 1.0 release. The conference also featured a lot of React Native talks and a special 10th anniversary panel with original creators and core contributors.
React Native 0.82
A landmark release: 0.82 is New Architecture only. There’s no turning back now: Legacy Architecture code will be removed in the next version. The release also introduced experimental Hermes V1 and upgraded to React 19.1.1.
VegaOS — React Native built into the OS
Amazon dropped a bombshell: their new FireTV devices run VegaOS, a brand new Linux-based operating system built from scratch with React Native baked in natively. Your RN apps run as first-class citizens on the platform!
October
React Conf announcements
React Conf took place again in Las Vegas, and of course brought exciting news for React Native developers:
- <VirtualView>— a new building block for virtualized lists. Combined with synchronous events, this component can finally eliminate those annoying blank spaces during fast scrolling. The foundation for the next generation of list components!
- Web Performance API — the well-known performance.mark() and performance.now() are now available in React Native. Better profiling and performance debugging, just like on the web.
React Native Bottom Tabs v1
Callstack's React Native Bottom Tabs hit version 1.0! This library brings truly native tab bars to React Native. Version 1.0 drops Legacy Architecture support. It works seamlessly with Expo Router, React Navigation, or as a standalone component.
Solito 5 🌉
The library that bridges React Native and Next.js navigation reached version 5 with support for Next.js 16 and Expo 54. Cross-platform developers rejoice: sharing navigation logic between your mobile app and web app just got even simpler.
November
v0 builds its iOS app with Expo 🤖
Vercel published a deep dive on how they built the v0 iOS app, and yes, it's built with Expo and React Native! The AI-powered code generation tool chose React Native for their mobile experience. Another major validation that AI companies are betting on RN.
React Native Godot 🎮
Born brought the Godot game engine to React Native! This opens up incredible possibilities: complex game-like animations, interactive experiences, and even full games, all running within your React Native app. The line between apps and games keeps blurring.
December
React Native 0.83 - No breaking changes
The perfect gift to end the year: React Native 0.83 shipped with zero breaking changes. After a year packed with major releases and rapid evolution, the team closed 2025 with a rock-solid release. Key updates include:
- React 19.2 with the new Activity component and useEffectEvent API
- React Native DevTools as a standalone macOS app
A huge milestone for React Native's maturity, and a sign of things to come as we approach 1.0!
See you in 2026!
What a year it's been! From React Native turning 10, through the New Architecture becoming the default, to the 1.0 announcement on the horizon! 2025 will go down as one of the most transformative years in React Native's history.
None of this would be possible without the incredible community - the contributors, library authors, conference organizers, and developers who build amazing apps every day. Thank you for making React Native what it is today.
Here's to an even bigger 2026!
