React Native Paper v.5 - Update Overview

Walczak describes React Native Paper as a cross-platform collection of customizable, production-ready React Native components based on Google’s Material guidelines. He says downloads grew from 200,000 per month to more than 400,000, or nearly four million per year. The team has also added customization options, fixed bugs, improved accessibility, and introduced components.

Material Design 3, also called Material You, adds a new visual style and features designed around personal needs. Paper v5 supports both Material Design 2 and 3, so teams can adopt the new version while retaining the older design. Users can switch between versions, light and dark modes, and three platforms in the example app.

The team aimed to keep the implementation in existing files and add the new style layer within the existing approach. A four-person internal workshop compared components across Material Design versions using documentation and a Figma kit, then set implementation principles. Design tokens name recurring decisions such as colors and typography, giving the codebase a shared source of truth for theming and future changes.

The migration guide starts with updating the theme. To keep Material Design 2, users set the theme’s `version` to `2`; Material You is the v5 default, with a new color palette structure. Users also need to review changed, renamed, and deprecated component props. In the demo, Walczak shows differences in bottom navigation, floating action buttons, and the collapsed drawer; some animations were recreated by observing Google apps.