Look at the Core

Grabowski uses project history and activity to argue that React Native is not fading. By his account, the project had more than 60,000 GitHub stars, over 200 releases, and more than 10 million npm downloads. Of 1,715 lifetime contributors, 49 had contributed that year so far, about 65 percent of the previous year’s total.

At the time of his figures, 239 pull requests and 683 issues were open. Grabowski says the open pull requests were about 3 percent of all submissions, and the open issues about 5 percent of all issues; 140 issues were older than six months. He notes that only 35 percent of submitted pull requests had been merged, with some stalled by Facebook’s infrastructure and process.

Grabowski describes how a small Facebook team prioritized internal needs and features, while community contributions could stall or be rejected after months of work. Facebook and the community agreed to use an RFC-like process to discuss major core changes and let contributors propose ideas before investing in implementation. He sees this as an early step toward broader community maintenance.

The GitHub organization React Native Community had begun supporting modules such as Blur, SVG, Modal, Camera, and Video, as well as sharing release updates. Grabowski presents it as a central place for community work, backed by Facebook. He points developers to its Discussions and Proposals repository to follow and shape topics including Fiber and Fabric, making React Native lighter, and extracting WebView or the CLI from core.

Grabowski reflects on a year of people joining and leaving the community, libraries being created or deprecated, and new releases shipping. He closes by emphasizing the shared commitment to building apps and encourages attendees to take useful ideas from the conference back to their software work.