Hey notJust Developers,

The long-awaited State of React Native 2024 report has finally been published! Thanks to everyone who voted for the notjust.dev/newsletter 🚀

Adding to the excitement, the React Native team has released the stable version of 0.78 with support for React 19. Let’s check out today’s highlights.

1. React Native 0.78 Stable Out 🔥
2. Expo Canary to Support 0.78 Soon 🚀
3. Nitro Views!!!! 🥳

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React Native 0.78 Stable Out 🔥

After 6 pre-releases, the stable version of React Native 0.78 was finally released last week. This update includes over 795 commits from 54 contributors! Here are the major highlights:

1. Added React 19 Support 🚀
2. React Compiler Support with Easy Setup
3. Support for Android vector drawable

Added React 19 Support 🚀

React Native 0.78 now supports React 19 and all of its features, including Action Functions (manages background async operations and errors, e.g., handle notifications), useActionState hook (tracks state and results of Actions, e.g., loading state while fetching data), ref as props (you can now pass & access component references as prop) and many more. Thanks to the Dream11 team for thoroughly testing these features in React Native 0.78.

React Compiler Support with Easy Setup

With React 19, the React Compiler is also available in React Native 0.78. React Compiler, is a compiler that turns your React code into optimized JavaScript code, applying necessary memoization (e.g., useMemo, useCallback, and React.memo) to your code that reduces unnecessary re-renders at app run time. Start using the React Compiler today by installing the npm library babel-plugin-react-compiler. No additional configuration is needed 💯. More details here.

Support for Android vector drawable

React Native 0.78 introduces a new way to load icons and graphics on Android using Vector Drawables. These Vector Drawables, which are XML files, can scale (e.g., make icons bigger for large screens) without losing quality. Previously, developers used PNG or JPG files, which required multiple versions for different screen sizes and increased app size. But now, using XML images reduces application size and ensures better rendering across screens without dropping frame rates.

NOTE: For more details, please refer to the React Native post.

Expo Canary to Support 0.78 Soon 🚀

The good news is that the Expo team announced that React Native 0.78 will soon be supported in canary releases of the Expo SDK. Canary releases represent a snapshot of the state of the main branch at the time of React Native 0.78releases. Currently, the expo@canary tag in CLI does not yet support 0.78, but it will soon.

NOTE: There will be no stable Expo SDK release for 0.78, but React Native 0.79 is expected to be released in April and will be supported in Expo SDK 53. More details about the canary release for 0.78 will be published here (by Expo Team).

Nitro Views!!!! 🥳

A few days ago, Marc released Nitro V0.23, which includes first-class support for creating React Native Views (e.g., Camera <View />). These Views (components) can use Fabric with Nitro (optimization layer), resulting in a very high performance while rendering the components on the device screen.

NOTE: These first-class <View /> components, called Nitro Views, and library maintainers can implement Nitro ​Views in their libraries starting today.

Fabric Meets Nitro 🤝

​Fabric is a new rendering system introduced with React Native New Architecture, bringing us C++ ShadowNode. This ShadowNode keeps track of each <View /> component placement (pixel) on the device's screen, ensuring responsiveness. However, Nitro Views made this C++ ShadowNode more performant by applying the Nitro Props Parsing technique (reading and interpreting the props of <View /> components more efficiently), thanks to Nitro's static compilation—optimized for performance before running on the device.

🔴 The State of React Native

React Native Ecosystem is moving fast. One way to keep up to date is by reading the State of React Native Survey. Or, even better, watch this video where I go over all the important things from the survey👇

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🔁 In case you missed it

Build the Reddit Clone in React Native You will learn to implement user authentication and management using Clerk, ensuring secure sign-in and account handling. Additionally, we will implement Jotai for global state management, making data handling efficient. Watch now

Build the Apple Invites App with React Native & Reanimated In this video, we’re building an Apple-style Invite App using React Native and Reanimated. We’ll design a beautiful UI with blur effects, animations, and smooth transitions using Reanimated 4. Watch now

🔥 Press worthy

1️⃣ Easily add analytics to your React Native app in under 1 minute with Vexo. Use the promo code “NotJustDev10” for a 10% discount!

2️⃣ ROFI has launched Expo AI Chatbot, the fastest way to create React Native AI apps with Next.js AI chatbot—get the codebase for free here.

3️⃣ React-native-reanimated 3.17 is out, supports react-native-edge-to-edge without any extra config for Android 15+.

4️⃣ Create-Expo-Stack now supports Unistyles 3.0 by Jacek.

5️⃣ Expo Team has published an incredible guide on — How to build Custom Navigation Tabs with Expo Router UI💯

6️⃣ Create your own iOS Widget in 12 minutes using Expo — by Simon 📌

That’s it 🙌

Before we wrap up today, what do you think about Postman? Isn't it doing the job? Should we switch to ​Curl​ instead?😃

Did you learn something new today?

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The newsletter was written by Anis and edited by Vadim Savin.

Vadim Savin Helping you become a better developer together with the notJust.dev team