React Native EU 2023 Q&A Panel

Panelists were excited by Static Hermes, the New Architecture, large-scale code migrations, and growing adoption at Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. They also praised the community’s maturity and collaboration at the Core Contributor Summit. For improvement, they called for clearer guidance and reusable solutions instead of multiple tools solving the same problems.

Eli said React Server Components could bring a more official data-fetching pattern to React Native, drawing on lessons from Relay without requiring GraphQL. A Microsoft panelist said Microsoft maintains React Native for macOS and Windows to support its desktop products, and noted recent progress bringing Fabric to those platforms.

Panelists said New Architecture adoption among libraries is progressing, with community contributions, migration guides, a proposed library template, and an interop layer helping older libraries work in New Architecture apps. On the web, they discussed bringing browser APIs and React web experiences closer to React Native, while making React Native experiences easier to run across platforms.

Callstack panelists recommended Expo for most new apps, citing its developer experience, ecosystem, and upgrade support; a native brownfield integration may be a better fit for the CLI. They described Expo prebuild and config plugins as options that can also extend CLI projects. To broaden adoption, panelists pointed to desktop support and making it easier for web and native developers to share skills.

Asked about React Native 1.0, a panelist said the milestone should represent stable releases and changes to how breaking changes are managed, rather than a label alone. The team is still working through release cadence and how platform updates affect compatibility. The panel also raised unanswered questions about New Architecture stability and whether Reanimated should replace core Animated.