Christoph Nakazawa recalls an early hackathon prototype that ran in Node.js on a computer and drove views on a phone. Tom Occhino says the first live updates to native views made the idea feel significant. He traces the motivation to slower development cycles at Facebook and duplicated work across iOS, Android, and web teams.
Discussion Panel: 10 Years of React Native and Beyond
Speakers
Callstack host James leads a React Universe Conf 2025 panel with Expo CEO Charlie Cheever, Callstack CTO Mike Grabowski, Meta React Native core team member Nicola Corti, Nakazawa Tech CEO Christoph Nakazawa, and Vercel CPO Tom Occhino on React Native’s history, current tradeoffs, and future.
The panel recalls skepticism about app quality, startup time, and using untyped JavaScript, and says strong products helped win support. Charlie Cheever points to Expo’s support for native code, autolinking, and continuous native generation as milestones. Panelists also credit Hermes and bytecode caching with improving startup performance, and community efforts such as Lean Core with broadening contributions.
Panelists value React Native’s community, native views, native-code escape hatches, and the ability to build across platforms from one codebase without necessarily sacrificing product quality. They also identify stability and inconsistent web and mobile APIs as areas to improve. Tom Occhino argues that code sharing should not come at the cost of an experience that feels right on each platform.
The panel sees stability, backward compatibility, easier distribution, and simpler brownfield integration as important goals. Charlie Cheever hopes React Native can reach more of the developers building for mobile, while other panelists imagine it extending to AR or adapting to AI-driven development. Their advice to developers includes building valuable products, learning the fundamentals, and contributing to the community.
Takeaways
- Win support by building products people value, then explain the technology behind them.
- Prioritize stable APIs and compatibility so teams can maintain apps with fewer upgrade burdens.
- Share code where it improves team efficiency, while keeping platform-specific user experience in view.
- Make brownfield integration and app distribution easier to lower the cost of adopting React Native.
- Build ambitiously, learn how the framework works, and contribute alongside the community.
Mentioned in this talk
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What was claimed 13
- role atNicola Corti is focused on open-source React Native at
Meta“I work as an Honor Engineer on the React Native team at Meta”
0:24inAll devs make mistakes, even at MetaYouTube Verified6 sources· Talk
- role atMike Grabowski is Founder and CTO at
Callstack“I'm a co-founder of Callstack.”
0:26inWe’re making opportunities for people to connectYouTube Verified6 sources· Talk
- role atCharlie Cheever is CEO at Expo
“Charlie Cheever, CEO at Expo.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- role atChristoph Nakazawa is CEO at Nakazawa Tech
“Christoph Nakazawa, CEO at Nakazawa Tech.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- role atTom Occhino is chief product officer at
Vercel“Tom Occhino, chief product officer at Vercel.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- metricReact Native: About 70,000 GitHub stars in 72 hours after its announcement
“React Native got about 70,000 GitHub stars in 72 hours.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- foundedCharlie Cheever founded Expoco-founder
“James, my co-founder at Expo, and I”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- featureReact Native: Supports sharing code across platforms while rendering native views
“being able to write for both platforms with a single codebase”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- integrates withExpo integrates with React Nativesupports native code, autolinking, and continuous native generation
“we decided we were going to make Expo work really well with native code”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- feature
Hermes Agent: Bytecode caching and precompilation improved startup performance and reduced app size“it improved RTI ... and made our app smaller”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- featureReact Native: Can use native views and fall back to Swift or Kotlin for functionality unavailable in JavaScript libraries
“I can always fall back to Swift or Kotlin”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- metricReact Native: About nine times fewer developers than React web
“there are about nine times as many React web developers as React Native developers”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- usesPartiful uses React Native
“Partiful is written in React Native.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
