website/blog/2025-02-03-react-native-core-contributor-summit-2024.md
Every year, the core contributors in the React Native Community get together with the React Native team to collaboratively shape the direction of this project.
Last year was no different—with small exception. We usually meet a day before React Universe Conf (formerly React Native EU) at Callstack HQ in Wrocław. In 2024, learning from past experiences, we hosted the Summit for two consecutive days, so that we can have more unstructured time together.
<!--truncate-->This annual tradition has become a valuable opportunity for contributors to share insights and voice their concerns, and for the core team to share their plans and gather feedback from key contributors to the React Native ecosystem—including partner companies, individual library authors and friends.
We divided the Summit into two tracks covering following topics:
In this blog post, we’d like to give you a sneak peek of the results of this gathering.
We had an extensive discussion about the release process for React Native. Core Team appreciates the value of having contributors from outside Meta involved in releases and emphasizes the importance of having nightly releases, which are particularly beneficial for Out-of-Tree platforms like React Native visionOS, library maintainers (Reanimated) and frameworks (Expo). We discussed the frequency of releases, with some folks asking for more frequent releases to ship fixes faster, while others expressed concerns about the impact on 3rd party libraries and upgrading efforts.
We also brainstormed ways to reduce unintentional breaking changes and improve communication about compatibility between React Native and 3rd party dependencies.
This session showed how complex it is to manage releases for React Native, and how delicate this topic is, given all the different parts of the ecosystem that need to be considered.
Now that the New Architecture has shipped as stable, we discussed what we should focus on next. What could be the next big thing? The topics revolved around:
This session was dedicated to Microsoft's RFC revolving around the idea of bringing a subset of Web APIs to React Native. It aims to enhance React Native’s scalability and attract more web developers by leveraging familiar APIs. Opening access to a wealth of existing open-source web libraries that don't have explicit React Native support.
Standardizing on Web API specifications is not only beneficial but also essential for React Native growth, and aligns well with our Many Platforms vision and react-strict-dom project. The web offers a unified interface through its specifications, which React Native community modules currently lack. Microsoft has identified around 200 essential Web APIs that could be implemented first for platforms they support: iOS, Android, Windows and macOS.
We encourage library developers to align their APIs with web specifications whenever possible, as this standardization will improve code portability and developer experience across platforms.
While the proposal seems beneficial for the future of React Native, we're still brainstorming the next steps forward. One concern we noticed is governance of the APIs, and whether they’d need to live in a separate repository from the platform implementations. Another around diverging from the official specification in case a specific platform allows for behaviors not specified by the W3C. We would need to figure out how to avoid bundling unnecessary modules, e.g. with a Babel plugin. Not to mention the scope of such initiative is quite large.
The session conclusion reinforced two key points: First, there is strong alignment across the React Native community on adopting web-compatible specifications where possible. Second, we need to establish a clear technical strategy for how these Web API implementations can be maintained separately for different platforms. Microsoft together with Callstack could work on refining the original RFC and produce a proof of concept implementation for a smaller number of APIs as a community initiative. This incremental approach will help us validate the design and developer experience before expanding the scope.
In 2019, the React Native team started the Lean Core initiative. The goal was to tackle the surface area of React Native’s core and reduce APIs and components that were outdated and legacy. Since then, the React Native components and API surfaces have been long overdue another round of clean up.
Today, there are many components that are not actively being maintained with better community alternatives. Additionally, there are components that have duplicates that should eventually be consolidated for maintainability.
On the API side, a lot of the JS layer APIs are tied to native iOS & Android implementations, rather than being truly platform agnostic. For example, with Pressable, we have props like android_disableSound and android_ripple. Ideally, React Native components should have the smallest possible API surface that is not tied to any specific platform.
As Out-of-Tree platforms are growing and being adopted more by the ecosystem, there needs to be a path to reduce the component and API surface of React Native core, reducing the load on the React Native core team, and also making it significantly easier for Out-of-Tree platform & library maintainers to stay up-to-date.
As an added bonus, this would make it easier for beginner app developers to pick up React Native, as there are less duplicated components and "gotchas" for them to learn. Where there is a better community alternative, developers can be signposted and encouraged to use the community alternatives available.
During the session, we discussed:
As a next step, a group of the core contributors will look at collecting more telemetry and data, assessing community alternatives, and putting together an RFC detailing the proposed changes.
Recently, Marc Rousavy introduced Nitro Modules as an alternative approach to creating Native Modules. Nitro Modules utilize experimental C++ Swift Interop and incorporate a bunch of enhancements that can lead to improved performance in certain scenarios. However, during this session, we discussed the various trade-offs involved between Nitro Modules and existing TurboModules.
While Nitro Modules offer some performance benefits, they also have limitations and considerations that need to be addressed. For example, the use of experimental interop features might introduce complexity or compatibility issues that are not present in TurboModules. Our discussion focused on these trade-offs and the potential for upstreaming some of Nitro Modules' improvements into React Native Core, which could allow developers to benefit from more performant modules for everyone.
Out-of-Tree Platforms presents the full power of React Native, where we can share one JS codebase between different platforms running on our mobile devices, desktops or even on VR/XR devices. Creating such a platform currently isn’t the easiest process, actually there are no guidelines on how things should be created, developed and maintained. Also React Native Core in a way is tied to Android and iOS platforms. In the future we could aim for a scenario where all the platforms are treated equally and integrate with a C++/JS core through the same APIs.
During this session maintainers of different platforms discussed what are the problems, what they struggle with and what should be the solution to unify the process of creating and maintaining new Out-of-Tree platforms.
Another aspect of this session was to discuss CocoaPods and future plans related to managing native dependencies. Recently the CocoaPods team announced that they’ve moved to maintenance mode and new major improvements or features won’t be shipped. There are various alternatives that could be used and during this session we discussed their pros and cons, and what migration would look like.
Steven and Saad from Microsoft, maintainers of react-native-windows and react-native-macos, hosted a session to listen and gather feedback from contributors related to Desktop platforms. Topics discussed included exploring how to increase adoption of React Native for Desktop (such as having a dedicated workflow in Visual Studio, or exposing desktop as part of Nx), as well as how to support Expo, which is a continual pain point for more adoption.
There’s a big discrepancy in availability of community modules between macOS and Windows, largely due to the fact that iOS code is mostly compatible with macOS, while RNW needs bespoke implementations. While working on the New Architecture for React Native for Windows, the team sees potential in C++ modules allowing for even more code sharing across platforms which will hopefully ease the burden of targeting desktop platforms. It’s worth noting that on the community side Software Mansion is working on adding desktop support for their most popular modules, such as React Native Screens, Gesture Handler and Reanimated.
We’re still impressed by how spending several hours together for a couple of days resulted in so much knowledge-sharing and cross-pollination of ideas. During this summit, we planted the seeds for initiatives that will help us improve and re-shape the React Native ecosystem.
If you’re interested in joining the development of React Native, make sure you join our open initiatives and read the contribution guide we have on our website. We hope to meet you in person as well in the future!