We are excited to release a new version of React Native, 0.69.0. This version comes with several improvements for the New Architecture of React Native and new features: React 18 support & bundled Hermes. Read on to learn more!
Hello everyone! Today we are announcing the 0.68.0 release of React Native, with opt-in to the New React Native Architecture, bug fixes and more.
Happy new year everyone! Today we are announcing the latest release of React Native, 0.67.0, along with some updates on the release process that we have been working on in the past few months.
Today we’re releasing React Native v0.66 for Android 12 and iOS 15 support alongside fixes and general updates.
Today we’re releasing React Native version 0.65 with a new version of Hermes, improvements to accessibility, package upgrades, and more.
Hermes, Facebook’s open source JavaScript VM optimized for React Native, has been upgraded to version 0.8.1. Some of the stand-out features in this release are:
Intl) is now built into Hermes on Android and enabled by default, with only 57-62K per API size overhead (compared to JSC's 6MiB). With this change, Hermes users no longer require locale polyfills. A big thank you to @mganandraj and other partners at Microsoft for driving the implementation to make this happen!Function.prototype.toString that fixed a performance drop due to improper feature detection and supports the source code injecting use case.You can find the full Hermes changelog here.
Follow steps here to opt-in your app to Hermes if you haven’t already to leverage these new features and gains!
Last year Facebook took the GAAD pledge to improve accessibility within React Native. 0.65 shares the results of this pledge and other accessibility wins! Some notable changes include:
getRecommendedTimeoutMillis API on Android. This exposes a user’s preferred default timeout value as set in Android’s accessibility options and is for users who may need extra time to review or reach controls, etc.disabled and unselected on components.You can follow along or contribute to our outstanding accessibility issues here!
react-native-codegen version 0.0.7 is now needed as a devDependency in the package.json.This release includes over 1100 commits from 61 contributors. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and supported this release! You can find the full changelog here.
Today we’re releasing React Native 0.64 that ships with support for Hermes on iOS.
Hermes is an open source JavaScript engine optimized for running React Native. It improves performance by decreasing memory utilization, reducing download size and decreasing the time it takes for the app to become usable or “time to interactive” (TTI).
With this release, we are happy to announce that you can now use Hermes to build on iOS as well. To enable Hermes on iOS, set hermes_enabled to true in your Podfile and run pod install.
use_react_native!(
:path => config[:reactNativePath],
# to enable hermes on iOS, change `false` to `true` and then install pods
:hermes_enabled => true
)
Please keep in mind that Hermes support on iOS is still early stage. We are keeping it as an opt-in as we are running further benchmarking. We encourage you to try it on your own applications and let us know how it is working out for you!
Inline Requires is a Metro configuration option that improves startup time by delaying execution of JavaScript modules until they are used, instead of at startup.
This feature has existed and been recommended for a few years as an opt-in configuration option, listed in the Performance section of our documentation. We are now enabling this option by default for new applications to help people have fast React Native applications without extra configuration.
Inline Requires is a Babel transform that takes module imports and converts them to be inline. As an example, Inline Requires transforms this module import call from being at the top of the file to where it is used.
Before:
import { MyFunction } from 'my-module';
const MyComponent = (props) => {
const result = MyFunction();
return <Text>{result}</Text>;
};
After:
const MyComponent = (props) => {
const result = require('my-module').MyFunction();
return <Text>{result}</Text>;
};
More information about Inline Requires is available in the Performance documentation.
Over the last year Facebook has sponsored the Major League Hacking fellowship, supporting contributions to React Native. Jessie Nguyen and Saphal Patro added the ability to use the Performance tab on Chrome DevTools to visualize the execution of your application when it is using Hermes.
For more information, check out the new documentation page.
We have added Proxy support to Hermes, enabling compatibility with popular community projects like react-native-firebase and mobx. If you have been using these packages you can now migrate to Hermes for your project.
We plan to make Hermes the default JavaScript engine for Android in a coming release so we are working to resolve the remaining issues people have when using Hermes. Please open an issue on the Hermes GitHub repo if there are remaining issues holding back your app from adopting Hermes.
React 17 does not include new developer-facing features or major breaking changes. For React Native applications, the main change is a new JSX transform enabling files to no longer need to import React to be able to use JSX.
More information about React 17 is available on the React blog.
Thank you to the hundreds of contributors that helped make 0.64 possible! The 0.64 changelog includes all of the changes included in this release.
Today we’re releasing React Native 0.63 that ships with LogBox turned on by default.
We’ve heard frequent feedback from the community that errors and warnings are difficult to debug in React Native. To address these issues we took a look at the entire error, warning, and log system in React Native and redesigned it from the ground up.
LogBox is a completely redesigned redbox, yellowbox, and logging experience in React Native. In 0.62 we introduced LogBox as an opt-in. In this release, we’re launching LogBox as the default experience in all of React Native.
LogBox addresses complaints that errors and warnings were too verbose, poorly formatted, or unactionable by focusing on three primary goals:
To achieve these goals, LogBox includes:
We’ve wrapped all of these features into an improved visual design that’s consistent between errors and warnings and allows paginating through all logs in one enjoyable UI.
With this change we’re also deprecating YellowBox in favor of LogBox APIs:
LogBox.ignoreLogs(): This function replaces YellowBox.ignoreLogs([]) as a way to silence any logs that match the given strings or regexes.LogBox.ignoreAllLogs(): This function replaces console.disableYellowBox as a way to turn off error or warning notifications. Note: this only disables notifications, uncaught errors will still open a full screen LogBox.In 0.63, we will warn when using these deprecated modules or methods. Please update your call sites off of these APIs before they are removed in 0.64.
For more information on LogBox and debugging react native, see the docs here.
React Native is built to enable applications to meet user’s expectations of the platform. This includes avoiding “tells”—little things that give away that the experience was built with React Native. One major source of these tells has been the Touchable components: Button, TouchableWithoutFeedback, TouchableHighlight, TouchableOpacity, TouchableNativeFeedback, and TouchableBounce. These components make your application interactive by allowing you to provide visual feedback to user interactions. However, because they include built-in styles and effects that don’t match the platform interaction, users can tell when experiences are written with React Native.
Further, as React Native has grown and our bar for high-quality applications has gone up, these components haven't grown with it. React Native now supports platforms like Web, Desktop, and TV, but support for additional input modalities has been lacking. React Native needs to support high-quality interaction experiences on all platforms.
To address these problems, we are shipping a new core component called Pressable. This component can be used to detect various types of interactions. The API was designed to provide direct access to the current state of interaction without having to maintain state manually in a parent component. It was also designed to enable platforms to extend it's capabilities to include hover, blur, focus, and more. We expect that most people will build and share components utilizing Pressable under the hood instead of relying on the default experience of something like TouchableOpacity.
import { Pressable, Text } from 'react-native';
<Pressable
onPress={() => {
console.log('pressed');
}}
style={({ pressed }) => ({
backgroundColor: pressed ? 'lightskyblue' : 'white'
})}>
<Text style={styles.text}>Press Me!</Text>
</Pressable>;
A simple example of a Pressable component in action
You can learn more about it from the documentation.
Every native platform has the concept of system-defined colors. Colors that automatically respond to system theme settings such as Light or Dark mode, accessibility settings such as a High Contrast mode, and even its context within the app such as the traits of a containing view or window.
While it is possible to detect some of these settings via the Appearance API and/or AccessibilityInfo and set your styles accordingly, such abstractions are not only costly to develop but are approximating the appearance of native colors. These inconsistencies are particularly noticeable when working on a hybrid application, where React Native elements co-exist next to the native ones.
React Native now provides an out-of-the-box solution to use these system colors. PlatformColor() is a new API that can be used like any other color in React Native.
For example, on iOS, the system provides a color called labelColor. That can be used in React Native with PlatformColor like this:
import { Text, PlatformColor } from 'react-native';
<Text style={{ color: PlatformColor('labelColor') }}>
This is a label
</Text>;
Sets the color of the Text component to labelColor as defined by iOS.
Android, on the other hand, provides colors like colorButtonNormal. You can use this color in React Native with:
import { View, Text, PlatformColor } from 'react-native';
<View
style={{
backgroundColor: PlatformColor('?attr/colorButtonNormal')
}}>
<Text>This is colored like a button!</Text>
</View>;
Sets the background color of the View component to colorButtonNormal as defined by Android.
You can learn more about PlatformColor from the documentation. You can also check the actual code examples present in the RNTester.
DynamicColorIOS is an iOS only API that lets you define which color to use in light and dark mode. Similar to PlatformColor, this can be used anywhere you can use colors. DynamicColorIOS uses iOS’s colorWithDynamicProvider under the hood.
import { Text, DynamicColorIOS } from 'react-native';
const customDynamicTextColor = DynamicColorIOS({
dark: 'lightskyblue',
light: 'midnightblue'
});
<Text style={{ color: customDynamicTextColor }}>
This color changes automatically based on the system theme!
</Text>;
Changes the text color based on the system theme
You can learn more about DynamicColorIOS from the documentation.
After over four years from its release, we are dropping support for iOS 9. This change will allow us to move faster by being able to reduce the number of compatibility checks that need to be placed in the native code to detect whether a given feature was supported on a certain iOS version. With its market share of 1%, it shouldn’t have much negative impact on your customers.
At the same time, we are dropping support for Node 8. Its LTS maintenance cycle expired in December 2019. The current LTS is Node 10 and it is now the version that we are targeting. If you are still using Node 8 for the development of React Native applications, we encourage you to upgrade in order to receive all the latest security fixes and updates.
<View /> in <Text /> without explicit size: You can now render any <View /> inside any <Text /> component without setting its width and height explicitly, which wasn’t always possible. On previous releases of React Native, this would result in a RedBox.xib to storyboard: Starting April 30, 2020, all apps submitted to the App Store must use an Xcode storyboard to provide the app’s launch screen and all iPhone apps must support all iPhone screens. This commit adjusts the default React Native template to be compatible with this requirement.Thank you to the hundreds of contributors that helped make 0.63 possible!
Special thanks to Rick Hanlon for authoring the section on
LogBoxand Eli White for authoring thePressablepart of this article.
To see all the updates, take a look at the 0.63 changelog.
Today we’re releasing React Native version 0.62 which includes support for Flipper by default.
This release comes in the midst of a global pandemic. We’re releasing this version today to respect the work of hundreds of contributors who made this release possible and to prevent the release from falling too far behind master. Please be mindful of the reduced capacity of contributors to help with issues and prepare to delay upgrading if necessary.
Flipper is a developer tool for debugging mobile apps. It’s popular in the Android and iOS communities, and in this release we’ve enabled support by default for new and existing React Native apps.
Flipper provides the following features out of the box:
Additionally, since Flipper is an extensible platform, it provides a marketplace that pulls plugins from NPM so you can publish and install custom plugins specific to your workflows. See the available plugins here.
For more information, check out the Flipper documentation.
We’ve added a new Appearance module to provide access to the user's appearance preferences, such as their preferred color scheme (light or dark).
const colorScheme = Appearance.getColorScheme();
if (colorScheme === 'dark') {
// Use dark color scheme
}
We’ve also added a hook to subscribe to state updates to the users preferences:
import { Text, useColorScheme } from 'react-native';
const MyComponent = () => {
const colorScheme = useColorScheme();
return <Text>useColorScheme(): {colorScheme}</Text>;
};
See the docs for Appearance and useColorScheme for more information.
As part of our Lean Core effort and to bring Apple TV in line with other platforms like React Native Windows and React Native macOS, we’ve started to remove Apple TV specific code from core.
Going forward, Apple TV support for React Native will be maintained in react-native-community/react-native-tvos along with the corresponding react-native-tvos NPM package. This is a full fork of the main repository, with only the changes needed to support Apple TV.
Releases of react-native-tvos will be based on the public release of React Native. For this 0.62 release of react-native please upgrade Apple TV projects to use react-native-tvos 0.62.
When 0.61 was released, the community introduced a new upgrade helper tool to support developers upgrading to new versions of React Native. The upgrade helper provides a diff of changes from the version you're on to the version you're targeting, allowing you to see the changes that need to be made for your specific upgrade.
Even with this tool, issues come up when upgrading. Today we're introducing more dedicated upgrading support by announcing Upgrade-Support. Upgrade Support is a GitHub issue tracker where users can submit issues specific to upgrading their projects to receive help from the community.
We're always working to improve the upgrade experience, and we hope that these tools give users the support they need in the edge cases we haven't covered yet.
require('react-native').unstable_enableLogBox() to your index.js file.onSlidingComplete accessibility events, and changing the default role of Switch component from "button" to "switch".propTypes from core components in order to reduce the app size impact of React Native core and to favor static type systems which check at compile time instead of runtime.accessibilityStates property in favor of the new accessibilityState prop which is a more semantically rich way for components to describe information about their state to accessibility services.onTextInput from TextInput as it’s uncommon, not W3C compliant, and difficult to implement in Fabric. We also removed the undocumented inputView prop, and selectionState.AccessibilityInfo.fetch was already deprecated, but in this release we added a warning.useNativeDriver is now required to support switching the default in the future.ref of an Animated component is now the internal component and deprecated getNode.Thank you to the hundreds of contributors that helped make 0.62 possible!
To see all the updates, take a look at the 0.62 changelog.
We’re excited to announce React Native 0.61, which includes a new reloading experience we’re calling Fast Refresh.
When we asked the React Native community about common pain points, one of the top answers was that the “hot reloading” feature was broken. It didn’t work reliably for function components, often failed to update the screen, and wasn’t resilient to typos and mistakes. We heard that most people turned it off because it was too unreliable.
In React Native 0.61, we’re unifying the existing “live reloading” (reload on save) and “hot reloading” features into a single new feature called “Fast Refresh”. Fast Refresh was implemented from scratch with the following principles:
To see Fast Refresh in action, check out this video:
Give it a try, and let us know what you think! If you prefer, you can turn it off in the Dev Menu (Cmd+D on iOS, Cmd+M or Ctrl+M on Android). Turning it on and off is instant so you can do it any time.
Here are a few Fast Refresh tips:
// @refresh reset comment to the file with that component.console.log or a debugger statement during edits is a neat debugging technique.Please report any issues with Fast Refresh on GitHub, and we’ll look into them.
act, and more. See the React 16.9 blog post for an automated migration script and more information.Thanks to all of the contributors that helped make 0.61 possible!
To see all the updates, take a look at the 0.61 changelog.
After months of hard work from hundreds of contributors, the React Native Core team is proud to announce the release of version 0.60. This release handles significant migrations for both Android and iOS platforms, and many issues are resolved too. This blog post covers the highlights of the release. As always though, refer to the changelog for more detailed information. Finally, thank you contributors for helping us to make this milestone!
There have been many improvements to the accessibility APIs, like announceForAccessibility, plus improvements to roles, action support, flags, and more. Accessibility is a complex science, but we hope these improvements make it a bit easier to be an A11Y. Be sure to check React Native Open Source Update June 2019 for more details of these changes.
React Native's start screen has been updated! Thank you to the many contributors who helped create the new UI. This new "Hello World" will welcome users to the ecosystem in a more friendly, engaging way.
AndroidX is a major step forward in the Android ecosystem, and the old support library artifacts are being deprecated. For 0.60, React Native has been migrated over to AndroidX. This is a breaking change, and your native code and dependencies will need to be migrated as well.
With this change, React Native apps will need to begin using AndroidX themselves. They cannot be used side-by-side in one app, so all of the app code and dependency code needs to be using one or the other.
While your own native code will need to be migrated by you, @mikehardy, @cawfree, and @m4tt72 built a clever tool named "jetifier" to patch your node_modules. Library maintainers will need to upgrade, but this tool provide you with a temporary solution while giving them time to release an AndroidX version. So if you find errors related to AndroidX migration, give this a shot.
CocoaPods are now part of React Native's iOS project. If you weren't already, be sure to open iOS platform code using the xcworkspace file from now on (protip: try xed ios from the root project directory). Also, the podspecs for the internal packages have changed to make them compatible with the Xcode projects, which will help with troubleshooting and debugging. Expect to make some straightforward changes to your Podfile as part of the upgrade to 0.60 to bring this exciting support. Note that we are aware of a compatibility issue with use_frameworks!, and we're tracking an issue with workarounds and a future patch.
WebView and NetInfo were previously extracted into separate repositories, and in 0.60 we’ve finished migrating them out of the React Native repository. Additionally, in response to community feedback about new App Store policy, Geolocation has been extracted. If you haven’t already, complete your migration by adding dependencies to react-native-webview, @react-native-community/netinfo, and @react-native-community/geolocation. If you'd like an automated solution, consider using rn-upgrade-deprecated-modules. Maintainers have made more than 100 commits to these repositories since extraction and we’re excited to see the community’s support!
The team working on the React Native CLI has introduced major improvements to native module linking called autolinking! Most scenarios will not require the use of react-native link anymore. At the same time, the team overhauled the linking process in general. Be sure to react-native unlink any preexisting dependencies as mentioned in the docs above.
@lucasbento, @pvinis, @kelset, and @watadarkstar have built a great tool called Upgrade Helper to make the upgrade process simpler. It helps React Native users with brownfield apps or complex customizations to see what's changed between versions. Take a look at the updated upgrading docs and try it out today for your upgrade path!
Changes for AndroidX will almost certainly require updates to your library, so be sure to include support soon. If you're not able to upgrade yet, consider checking your library against the jetifier to confirm that users are able to patch your library at build time.
Review the autolinking docs to update your configs and readme. Depending on how your library was previously integrated, you may also need to make some additional changes. Check the dependencies guide from the CLI for information on how to define your dependency interface.
While these are the highlights that we noted, there are many others to be excited about. To see all the updates, take a look at the changelog. As always, stay tuned for more news. Enjoy 0.60 in the meantime!