JSX to Live Activity: The Story of Voltra

Name: JSX to Live Activity: The Story of Voltra
Start: 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Paris, France

Presented

React Native Connection

Speaker

Szymon Chmal

Software Developer

Callstack

What is needed to bring Live Activities and widgets for iOS and Android to React Native, so developers do not have to learn and write native code? It turns out: a lot.

Voltra makes this possible, but getting there was not straightforward. Custom React renderers, hooks reimplemented from scratch, isomorphic rendering for server and client, Turbo Modules, and support for both Expo and bare React Native projects all had to come together to make widgets feel natural in React Native.

In this talk, Szymon will focus on the most interesting parts of that journey: the workarounds that worked, the hacks that became stable, and the ideas that failed before the final architecture started to make sense.

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