Todd Werth:

Welcome back to React Native Radio Podcast. My name is Todd and I'd like to wish everyone a very happy holiday season. Episode 350, React Native Wrapped 2025.

Mazen Chami:

All right. Welcome back everyone. As you'll be able to notice, the band is back together. Welcome back, Robin and Jamon.

Robin Heinze:

Woo.

Mazen Chami:

Yay. We're back. Isn't there like a-

Robin Heinze:

We didn't disappear forever, just

Mazen Chami:

For a little bit. Yeah, we tried. You both are sabbatical. I had to pull you back.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. Thanks for kind of holding down the fort here, Mazen, while we were gone. I've been listening and you're doing a great job. Thank you. It was lonely, but it was fun.

Robin Heinze:

Aw. Now I feel bad. No,

Mazen Chami:

It's not right. I don't. Maybe it's my turn for sabbatical. Excuse

Robin Heinze:

Me. Javin's more heartless than me. It's okay.

Mazen Chami:

No, no. Justin says no sabbatical for me. Nope, nope, nope. Shaking his head. Yeah. Well, we also have a guest host with us today, Josh Yost. Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Yoes:

Hey, Mazen . Great to be on here.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners? I'm sure some of them probably know you from social media and some blog posts, but go ahead and introduce yourself.

Josh Yoes:

Yeah. My name's Joshua Yost. I'm a staff software engineer here at Infinite Red. I live in Jamon's backyard of Vancouver, Washington or close to Portland, Oregon. And yeah, been working here for about three years now, something like that.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, that's awesome. Has it been? Yeah. Wow.

Josh Yoes:

Yeah. Time flies when you're having

Mazen Chami:

Fun. I guess so.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

Well, let's get into it because we have a big episode lined up for you all, kind of our last one for the year. As always, I'm Mazen. She's Robin. He's Jamin. He's Josh, and we're React Native Radio. Before we get into our topic, let's hear from our wonderful sponsor. InfantRed is a premier React Native consultancy located fully remote in the US. We're a team of 30 senior plus level React Native developers and support staff and have been doing this for nearly a decade. If you're looking for React Native expertise for your next project, hit us up at infinite.red/radio. Don't forget to mention that you heard about us through the React Native Radio podcast. Man, that sounded awesome.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, I compire those guys.

Mazen Chami:

They're pretty cool.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. I know a guy that works there.

Robin Heinze:

It's so nice of them to sponsor every episode of this podcast.

Mazen Chami:

We need to adjust the script though, because it's now officially over 10 years.

Robin Heinze:

Is it? Yes. It's not nearly a decade anymore. No. It is over a

Mazen Chami:

Decade. Over a decade. Yeah. Yeah.

Robin Heinze:

If you don't know, Enthrint Red celebrated our 10th birthday in October.

Mazen Chami:

And we act like 10-year-olds most of the time. That is a fact.

Robin Heinze:

Yes. We had a pinata at the birthday party and everything.

Mazen Chami:

A bunch of people cried. Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

Squabbles. All right. Let's get into our topic for today. Today's topic is our yearly topic, React Native Rewind for 2025. I'll go ahead and kick us off for January. January had a lot of highlights that kind of carried over from the previous year, but the main two things that were essentially launched in January, one was EAS hosting. This is Expo's version of a way to deploy a website. And it's pretty easy and pretty quick. You run your ES deploy commands and you have a website up with two commands, I believe it was. And I think JP on our team put out a video on his socials of being able to move a website from, I believe, Netlify over to EAS hosting within less than five minutes. So that's awesome that they've come up with that script. Expo continues to do all the good stuff that they do there.

And then also within January, React Native version 77 was released. This was the one that I was

Robin Heinze:

On. It was so long ago, because we're in the 80s

Mazen Chami:

Now. I know. 77. Yeah. And this was for anyone that kind of remembers what happened a year ago. I certainly don't. This had new CSS features for better layouts and sizing. This was also Android version 15 support and 16KB page support. Google set a requirement that everyone needed to be on these news specifications to release to the app store. And some CLI templates and updates were done.

Robin Heinze:

I see in our notes that you were on that.

Mazen Chami:

Yes. Release two. That was a release that I was on. I was on that release crew. Yeah, that was fun. It was fun being on that. And I believe I think so. I'm going to do one also next year. Just waiting on that confirmation.

Josh Yoes:

How nervous were you pressing the deploy button?

Mazen Chami:

Luckily, I did not have to do that. All I had to do was run a couple tests commands and then obviously help with any fixes that needed to happen, figure out where they were happening essentially, and then kind of push them upstream. So Nicola Corti and Ricardo Chipoweski on the Meta team, they were the ones that hit the deploy button. We basically gave them the green light that all the tests passed. And then if they

Robin Heinze:

Did- They don't let people outside Meta press that button.

Mazen Chami:

No, because if you've also seen a poll request, they almost close every poll request, but then I believe they cherry pick it. So they don't necessarily let anyone outside of Meta do the final touches to React Native.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. That's all good. I would not want to submit it. No. I

Robin Heinze:

Want the keys to that. No. No. To that pipeline.

Mazen Chami:

So Josh, one of the reasons why we have you on the show is we felt like you had a finger on the pulse for a lot of stuff that had been happening this year, helping with the newsletter content and within all that. What's your read on January?

Josh Yoes:

I think January really kicked off an exciting sort of time in React Native. I think there was a lot of innovations this year and especially I always get impressed to see Expo increase their offerings every year and really kind of make them more of a fleshed out product. And I think in particular, some of their hosting products this year really grew to a new level.

Robin Heinze:

When we were prepping this, I was like, "Hey, where's workflows on this list?" And then I realized it came out very, very end of 2024, but it was right around the same time as the hosting. And that was another thing that was just showing that Expo and YayS are becoming so much more full featured and well-rounded and mature.

Mazen Chami:

Nice. So let's move on to February. February also had another version of React Native release, 78. This was a big one because this included React 19 support. So if you all remember React 19, React 19 made the compiler. Compiler was officially enabled in React Native, so you were able to do the React compiler. And one of my other favorite ones, I'm not going to go through it, there's episodes on it. One of my favorite is Ref is now a prop, so you don't have to do the whole forward ref and all that kind of stuff just to get access to your ref is just automatically in the props. That makes life so much easier. Another one was moving towards smaller and faster releases, hence the two releases in two months. This is this example right there.

Mazen Chami:

I remember when the React Native team decided to go the other way. There were a lot of releases coming out and people were like, "I can't keep up. It's just constant releases." And so they went to, I don't remember exactly if it was quarterly or they went to a slower release cycle. Yeah. But I think they got to a point where a lot of the things they were adding were fairly small, not breaking things quite as often. And so they're like, "Okay, let's ramp this back up."

Robin Heinze:

77 seemed like a pretty low key release. I think there was at least one release in that range where there wasn't even an Expo SDK with it because the releases were pretty small.

Mazen Chami:

That was 78 and 79. Oh, wow.

Mazen Chami:

I didn't realize that.

Mazen Chami:

Well, 77, 78 and 79, I believe did not come with an Expo companion because 78 was so big with React 19 support. So the Expo team was like, "We're just going to give you a patch to Expo 52, I believe, to be able to do that on your own if you want it to, but hang tight for 79, which is going to come with 53 sort of thing."

Robin Heinze:

It's probably alert for later in the year.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, sorry. But then another quick thing for 78, there's a lot of other stuff, but opt-in for JavaScript logs in Metro that cleans up your Metro logs before it was just a whole bunch of information there. And then another thing I have here for February was the state of React Native survey 2024 results were announced and we did an episode on that R&R 329. I believe that was released in end of April. So we kind of do a quick recap of that there. So yeah, Josh, what are your thoughts on February?

Josh Yoes:

Again, February, I've kind of had my eyes on the React 19 support for a while. I know a few years ago we did a new architecture workshop at ChainReact, and a lot of it was kind of this prep that we've slowly the React team has been doing to prepare for some of these features. So it's exciting to see a lot of them kind of land with flags off it fully in production. I definitely think some of our clients have already started to see some of the increased the schedulers, some of those changes have definitely seen some improvements. And I also was definitely a fan of the props as refs. I think anybody who's worked in a component library really does not like that forward ref.

Robin Heinze:

Oh my

Josh Yoes:

God. Yeah. API, unfortunately. It made sense at the time, but that's one great thing about the React team is that they're always able to evolve and keep backwards compatibility. So definitely excited to see that.

Mazen Chami:

And then getting the types correct, that was a tough one. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Especially with Forward Ref.

So let's move on to March. March was a small one. The one thing to focus on here, and specifically we'll see why, as you all know, for the rest of the year, React Native PackageChecker was a app that was released. I believe it's ... Here we go. React-native-package-checker.versell.app. That's a way for you to simplify your new architecture migration with this auditing tool. Again, at this point, it's still the new architecture. It's still new, shiny tool that everyone's still adopting. So having a tool like this to help your migration process was pretty cool and pretty big. So that's pretty much all I want to highlight for March. Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

There was also the React Native framework or enterprise framework. Actually, what did it? It changed names. I

Josh Yoes:

Think it changed to Rock.

Mazen Chami:

Rock, that's right. Rock. Yeah. By CallStack. So that did come out and that was kind of a big deal. And then Josh, I'm going to surprise you with this one. Something really near and dear to your heart came out then. I should probably know this. It's your own library, the MCP server.

Josh Yoes:

That's right. That's

Mazen Chami:

Right.That's when you announced it.

Josh Yoes:

That's right. Yes. I'd released my iOS simulator, MCP. That's right.That was kind of exciting.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. Really quick, can you explain to our audience what that was or what that is?

Josh Yoes:

Yes. So one thing agents really popped off this year. I know even before this year, I was very skeptical of tool calling agentic editors, but this year really surprised me with that. And I was looking for something similar to Playwright because on the web, people were doing these really impressive demos of having their editor look at the screen, take screenshots, look at the logs. And I wanted that, but I looked at all the things and I saw and I was like, they don't have this for iOS yet. Nobody has done this. So like most developers, I'm like, well, I want it. I make it. So I put it together. And so I put together an MCP server that can sort of drive the iOS simulator and also take screenshots and look at that. It's sort of evolved a little bit with new features. There's actually been a lot of community contributions.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. I was noticing you have like 1300 stars and there's a bunch of pull requests that have come through and you have issues that are ... Well, it looks like most of these issues are you with future plans, but ...

Josh Yoes:

Me pointing out my own issues. Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

But that's really cool. We should really have you on to do just an episode just about that, to kind of talk about that in more detail. That'd be fun.

Josh Yoes:

Yeah, that would be great.

Mazen Chami:

Awesome. Moving on to April. So for April, we had the release of 79, React Native 79. This had a couple things. I'm actually going to highlight most of them because it was a pretty big update to React Native. One was new Metro features. So faster startup and package export support. That was big, something big that we wanted in Metro that kind of came. JSC was moved into a community package. So again, something else that Meta was handing off to the community. So Swift compatible native modules registration, we had that. Faster Android startup, that was actually a pretty cool one where we covered that in the 79 episode that we did. And then removal of remote JS debugging within Metro. So that was pretty cool to kind of see that within there. And then another package to kind of highlight here was the release of React Native Brownfield 1.0.

This was when it was officially announced. Think of it as just a way to have React Native in your native app, but then also be able to have a better and cleaner API and access to it. This was put out there from the team at CallStack during that

Robin Heinze:

Month. It's been around for a while. Was this like just the first stable release?

Mazen Chami:

Yes. This was when 1.0 officially was released. So first version.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah. I know CallStack has done a lot with Brownfield work and so the library's been around for a while, but I think the stable release of Reacting to Brownfield, I think also coincided a little bit with React Native Enterprise Framework, which was actually open sourced in May the month after. And they kind of talk about those two things together a lot

Because I think I might as well move to May, but talking about React Native Enterprise framework, which was open source at the end of May, it's just a bunch of tools that they really target towards enterprise companies who are doing lots of complex CICD pipelines and mono repos and Brownfield. If they're in the process of converting either all or parts of their app to React Native, a lot of times they're doing Brownfield work, stuff like that. And I think it's actually called Rock now. Yeah, we just said that, that it was originally React Native Enterprise framework, but Reactative doesn't like things using the React-

Mazen Chami:

Paid products. Yeah, you can do an open source product.

Robin Heinze:

Right. But when it's a monetized product, so it's called Rock now. But yeah, that came out in May. Another cool thing that happened in May for, this is more in the broader iOS world, but Apple was forced to stop taking a 27% cut of external off-platform paywall. So if your app takes a user outside of the app to a website to sign up for something or pay for something or buy something, Apple used to take 27% or something.

Mazen Chami:

So ridiculous. That was

Robin Heinze:

Nice. That's crazy. And they got served an injunction as part of a court case in May of this year saying, no, you can't do that. I think they're appealing, but I think it was a pretty big win for a lot of iOS developers and React Native developers who are shipping on iOS, which most of us are, I think. So that was big news. And then May also brought Expo XDK53, which was in line with React data 79. This is the one that kind of skipped a version. So 52 was 77 and 78, and then 53 was 79. Lots of features in this one that were kind of a big deal. This was their first new architecture by default, SDK.

Mazen Chami:

We saw that with a lot of different libraries starting to go in new

Robin Heinze:

Architecture by people.

Mazen Chami:

As we call it, the architecture.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah. The beginning of this year was really a lot of teams and libraries were focused on finally finishing the conversion to the new architecture. We saw a lot of activity in the reacting of directory, keeping track of, okay, which libraries have finished compatibility. I remember waiting for a handful of them that were really high profile ones that weren't done yet, and we were celebrating when they finally did it. And it was all kind of building up to the middle of the year, starting around this time where React Native and Expo all said, okay, new architecture is on by default now. It is the architecture and the legacy architecture. So that started with this one. I think Expo 53 also brought edge-to-edge support for Android, which had been coming for a while, and then some new APIs for background task work that were more modern. But the big thing was Reacting of 79 and the new architecture by default.

So yeah, that was May. And then in June, they made it even more official with the freezing of the legacy architecture. And by that they meant no more bug fixes in the legacy architecture, no more testing of it. Every time they do new releases now, they're not even testing whether things are broken in the old architecture. It's completely frozen. You're on your own, basically. So I think this is the year where we'll really be able to say it's really and truly done. We don't even need to do ... Hopefully not going to talk about it too much anymore. It's just like, yeah, React Native uses JSI and that's it. It's not a new thing anymore.

Mazen Chami:

We're going to get clients coming to us saying, "We didn't upgrade and now we have no idea how and we're so far behind."

Robin Heinze:

Okay. So maybe we will still be talking about it. Hopefully I don't think the-

Mazen Chami:

Now it's our problem.

Robin Heinze:

The main React Native team will be talking about it

Mazen Chami:

Quite so

Robin Heinze:

Much. Right. So Legacy Architecture was frozen in ReactNative80, which came out in June. ReactNative 80 was also a big deal because it introduced pre-builds on iOS. And what that meant, because pre-build, I usually think of Expo Prebuild, but in this case, it means when they ship React Native, a bunch of the core dependencies are prebuilt, meaning you don't have to compile them when you run React Native run iOS. And so your builds will take a lot less time, which is a big deal and a lot of people were really, really happy about it.

Josh Yoes:

Yeah. I know I just upgraded my MacBook to get those build times down. So I'm very excited about that feature this year as well.

Robin Heinze:

Yes. The year of developer experience in a lot of ways. And then June was also when we released Ignite 11, a. K.a. Ignite Bison, which was a big deal for Infinite Red in particular because it was sort of an evolution of our stack. We finally got rid of MobX Daytree from our Ignite Stack, which was a bittersweet thing that we did, but it sort of represented an evolution in how we build apps. But yeah, that was June. And then July had quite a bit of stuff in the third party library world.

Unistyles 3.0 came out with a new style sheet compatible API. So it's easier to adopt Unistyles because it just works. It has the same API style sheet. So that was a big thing. Reanimated V4 came out and it supported CSS animations and transitions, which was a big deal. And then FlashlessV2, which removed the need to do estimations like Flashless V1 was very much based on you have to tell it what you think the size of your list items are going to be. And it was a lot more work on the developer and V2 removed that. And then finally in July, we had the release of Rosenite, which ... So in 2024, at the very end of 2024, it was announced the React Native Dev Tools debugger as the new official React Native debugger. And Rosenite came from CallStack and it is a plugin system for React Native Dev tools.

So it has plugins for things like Tanstak Query, MMKV, Expo Atlas, networking performance, all sort of built into the tab structure of React Native Dev tools. Really cool tool. I think pretty important for the debugging world in React Native. And that was the highlights from July. We're kind of halfway through the year now. Jamon, you want to talk about August?

Mazen Chami:

Well, real quick, do we have any general thoughts about those four months that Robin went through?

Mazen Chami:

I actually want to backtrack us a little bit. We missed something big for March, and that's my bad because that was my month. Wow. Reactative turned 10. Oh

Robin Heinze:

Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, that's right. I forget that. That was the big thing. That's a big deal. Big deal for the year, right?

Mazen Chami:

Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

March, React Native turned 10. That was great. And

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, that's something- I think that's the announcement was something like January or February, right? Correct. And I think we did a blog post about that.

Robin Heinze:

We did a React Native Mornings episode too.

Mazen Chami:

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. As part of it, we did a React Native Mornings episode kind of like saying Happy Birthday to React Native. Robin refused to sing Happy Birthday with me, but that's fine.

Mazen Chami:

React Native Mornings was also launched this year, right?

Mazen Chami:

Correct. Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

March,

Mazen Chami:

That was our first episode, wishing React Native a happy birthday.

Mazen Chami:

That's on YouTube, folks.

Mazen Chami:

Yes. Yes. So yeah, quick thoughts on those last three months. From my perspective, Expo continues to push things forward, keep giving us that great developer experience while also packages are continuing to evolve, stay new architecture or the architecture relevant and pushing the needle that way. And we're starting to see new features that are applying to, that we had in React coming over to React Native and something that hasn't really landed just yet, like CSS grids is something that we're also trying to bring over to React Native. So all that stuff continuing to stay relevant within the React Native world.

Josh Yoes:

I know too, I was personally excited that a lot of the community libraries were really starting to take advantage of the new or the architecture. Particularly, I know that part of flashlists, the new rewrite wouldn't have been possible without some of the sort of layout changes that they had made. I believe some of the other ones reanimated. I was kind of taking advantage of the JSI part to rewrite parts of their core and C++. So I think it's kind of cool to see a lot of the community stuff sort of catch up, I guess, to the internals of what's sort of now newly possible.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, it was a good summer for

Mazen Chami:

React

Robin Heinze:

Native, definitely.

Mazen Chami:

That's awesome. We'll go for August, September, October and November. We didn't really ... I mean, we're recording this early December, so there's not a lot going on yet.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, we don't have a crystal ball.

Mazen Chami:

So in August, React Native 81 was released, 0.81. Do you all do that too where you just say 81? You don't say zero?

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, no. Zero point is always implied forever

Mazen Chami:

Because

Robin Heinze:

They won't go to 1.0.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, we'll see. And it's worth reading the blog post about it, but this one actually just felt like more of an evolution as well as more kind of Android 16, API level 36 and stability.

Robin Heinze:

It was like a chore. It was a chore release

Mazen Chami:

Really. It was, yeah. And then Faster iOS builds using pre-compilation, as you mentioned before. And then Maestro 2.0 was released and that came with Maestro Studio Desktop and some other upgrades to dependencies. Of course, Maestro is now something we rely on quite a bit. And so that was cool. A bit of a quieter month. And then September, there was an RFC for removing the legacy architecture entirely. So before that it was frozen. They weren't going to test it and everything, but now it's getting serious. It's like, no, it's going to be gone. You will not be able to run it. And of course there's compatibility mode and whatnot, but the legacy architecture itself would be gone. So 0.82 would then go on to remove it. And then I want to note really quickly that Mark Rasavi from Margello was extremely busy this whole year and he released all kinds of stuff.

Robin Heinze:

Here's just Nitro in front of everything now.

Mazen Chami:

Nitro in front of everything. React Native Nitrofetch, React Native Nitro

Robin Heinze:

Test.

Mazen Chami:

Nitro Image. Nitro Image. There's all kinds of stuff. So definitely go follow him on Twitter or GitHub or wherever you get your news. Actually, the React Native newsletter is a good place to do that. Reactnativenewsletter.com.

Mazen Chami:

I also want to point out Mark Rosavi will be on the podcast and React Native Mornings to do Nitro specific conversations.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, that's awesome. There's so much to go over

Mazen Chami:

There.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. In early October, then Gantt here at my business partner here at Infinite Red and I went to ReactConf and the React Foundation was announced. And so the governance now moves from the community or to the community for both React and React Native, which is very big news. This is great for the community, I think long term. It's in good hands. React 192 and React Native 0.82 were released, removing the legacy architecture entirely. This is moving quickly.

Robin Heinze:

It basically locks people to 81. 81 unless

Mazen Chami:

They're- You cannot upgrade

Robin Heinze:

Anymore until you are on the new architecture.

Mazen Chami:

And you can no longer do new architecture enabled false or RCT Newark enabled zero, I believe it was. You can no longer run those commands.

Mazen Chami:

You can do them. It just won't do anything. It's not going to do anything. Yeah. Hermes V1, confusingly named V1, version one, was released and that is Static Hermes now being the real Hermes.

Robin Heinze:

How is Hermes on a stable version, but React Native is not?

Mazen Chami:

It's a good question. Stable version, right? Yeah, it's pretty much. In

Mazen Chami:

Our hearts,

Mazen Chami:

It's in a stable version. Right.

Robin Heinze:

It's tables, just not Zember.

Mazen Chami:

In November, some fun news. I've been working in Gadot lately and a Gadot integration for React Native came out, React Native Gadot. And that's a pretty cool library. So go check that out. Do

Robin Heinze:

People know that Jamon's been making a game?

Mazen Chami:

I don't know. Have I talked about it? That stealth mode. Right.

Robin Heinze:

That's what he's been doing with his

Mazen Chami:

Sabbatical. By the way, I noticed that my wishlists are up to 435 last I checked.

Robin Heinze:

Wow.

Mazen Chami:

Nice. It's steadily going up. It's called Into the

Robin Heinze:

Dong. Check out and see. We'll link to your steam page in the show.

Mazen Chami:

It's not going to be a ready for a long time, but you can go wishlist it.

Robin Heinze:

Anyway. It'll make Jamon happy.

Mazen Chami:

This episode brought to you by Jam and Games. All right. A little see. UNOWIN 1.0 came out. It's tailwind bindings for React Native, but incredibly fast, and we are planning to have Yassic on to talk about it. So check that one out. And Fernando Rojo, who went to work for Vercel, finally revealed what he's been working on. Well, actually, he had revealed that prior, but he wrote an article, how we built the VZero iOS app. And this is honestly required reading. If you're a React Native developer, if you're an expo developer, you need to go read this article, how we built the VZero iOS app. Josh mentioned in our prep. Josh, you want to talk about what you said?

Josh Yoes:

Yes, definitely. It's sort of been on my radar for a little while. I definitely follow Fernando for a lot of stuff. He definitely is very generous with all of his knowledge. He's done a lot of things between NextJS and Expo and pretty much everything, but particularly this article has a lot of the nitty-gritty stuff that I'm often looking for. A lot of tutorials sort of have the basic stuff, which is always It's important, but sometimes it can be hard to find the more advanced UX experiences. So I think this article is really a good study guide for interactions that really make consumers happy.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, it is long and it has copious code examples and little embedded videos showing how things work. And honestly, I expect nothing else from Fernando. He's amazing. He's an incredible developer, but we can all learn from it. There's a lot of things that he just would not accept until they were, in his opinion, good enough. And he has a very high bar. So definitely go check it out. I am really impressed with what they did there at Vercel.

Josh Yoes:

I will say for myself personally, I haven't actually used VZero much, but I did download it the weekend that it came out and I had a lot of fun playing with it. I know a lot of people, there's a lot of vibe coding apps, but the experience on it was genuinely. I had a lot of fun.

Mazen Chami:

It's a lot of fun to just have an idea and bring it up in no time. And then for December, it hasn't happened yet, but 0.83 is planned to be released and maybe by the time this comes out. And the official React Native Twitter said you'll be able to profile and understand your map. From the official React Native Twitter, you'll be able to profile and understand your app more intuitively with Native support for the performance panel and network panel and React Native dev tools. So just like this is one thing I forgot to mention about Reactcomf, there were so many performance talks. It was actually really interesting how many of the talks were about making React and React Native more performant and how to measure that. And so those are very linked topics. And it was, I think, a big deal this whole year. But that wraps up the year as far as the big stuff.

There's way more stuff. We had probably, I don't know, 80 different things that we had written out. And we might work on a blog post to go with this or something. And if we do, we'll try to link to that in the show notes. I'm trying to rope Josh into writing that because he has his finger on the pulse of the community.

Robin Heinze:

Also, if we missed anything, feel free to tweet at us.

Mazen Chami:

Yes,

Mazen Chami:

Please. Absolutely. Awesome recap all. I think to kind of close it all off, I kind of want to go through some general thoughts about the year and what we feel like the focus was this year. I know Jim and you mentioned performance, just kind of piggyback off of that for a little bit. With the emergence of Nitro and all the different packages, Nitro Fitch, Nitro Text, Nitro Image, and Nitro Star, the possibilities are endless. We have some crazy performance packages that are starting to come out and some that are easy to build. The ongoing, I am the fastest list library out there. Battle continues between Legend list, Flashlist, Flatlist for all we know. And then also Discord coming to the table with their fast list. There's another one out there, so everyone- I'm

Robin Heinze:

Surprised there's not a Nitro list.

Mazen Chami:

You know what? You may have just created something. It does seem like a good fit. I would love to be using Fastest List. It's a mouthful to say.

Robin Heinze:

Fastest.

Mazen Chami:

Fastest list.That could be one built in Nitro.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. I feel like Mark actually tweeted about a list. Yeah, there's one called React Native Wishlist. So he does have one. He just hasn't updated in two years.

Robin Heinze:

Okay. But we may stay tuned. React Native Rewind 2026. We might be talking about Nitro List.

Mazen Chami:

The funny thing is that he calls it the fastest list component for React Native, and this was two years ago. So yeah, he beat us to the punch. That's hilarious. There you

Mazen Chami:

Go.

Robin Heinze:

Of course he did.

Mazen Chami:

Def Tools performance tooling, that's now an option for us. So we're able to test the performance of our apps. Unistells and Uniwind, we mentioned them earlier. Earlier, they're high performance styling tools out there, open source packages by Yassic. Great tools. I use Unistyles all the time on my client project, and it's absolutely a great one. So performance is a general theme of 2025.

Mazen Chami:

So I had asked on Twitter, and I'm just going to read some of the responses so that we don't miss any of these. We don't have time to go into them in any depth, but I'd asked what are the biggest news that you thought happened in 2025? And Adnan, who is a great follow on Twitter, he tweets a lot of React Native stuff, says Uniwind, WebGPU, Godot, Expo launch, which we forgot to mention, I think. Nitro modules, of course, that was late 2024. The Vizio app release Expo Awards. That was another big one. And many other things I probably missed. Yeah, we missed stuff too. Jamie Birch, who's been doing a ton of cool stuff with React Native, especially on the desktop side, says React Native fiddle, but good luck finding it. You're going to have to dig through his tweets because it didn't even come up on Google.

He says it's conspiracy. And then Evan Bacon chimes in and says, "Liquid glass inexpo router."

Robin Heinze:

Oh, yes. Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

That was a big one. And then secure environment variables with API routes and EAS hosting and then NPX test flight and of course launch.expo.dev. And then Chris Gaba says, I would say reanimated for Expo 54, React compiler and forced new architecture all happened basically simultaneously. And it was a lot. Forced new architecture? We've known about it for a long time. Only like six years. Right? That's funny. All of that forced.

Robin Heinze:

I still remember telling a client back in 2022 like, "Oh, this will be better when the new architecture lands pretty

Mazen Chami:

Soon." Yeah. Yeah. So Jamon, while you're continuing through that list, what are some of your general thoughts that you saw from

Mazen Chami:

Torchy- I'm actually done with the list. So yeah, general thoughts is similar. Performance was a huge deal and dev tools for sure. A lot of stuff like that. Expo continuing to become more and more just what everybody uses, new architecture. All of this, it just feels like all of these things that we've over the years knew were coming or wished were coming within the React Native community are actually becoming real. And it just feels like the community is responding to that. I mean, honestly, Flutter is sputtering. Robin wants me to say Fleet is Florida.

Robin Heinze:

I wanted to say Flutter is floundering, but it's really, do you go rhyme or do you go alliteration? It's really up to you.

Mazen Chami:

Flutter is having some issues. Maybe some Floodedevs would disagree, but I've seen plenty of Flutter devs complaining about what's happening over there. Won't go into it too much. Some other alternatives have also come out like Links and Baldy, but they're just well behind in community support and adoption. And so I think React Native and Explorer are just dominating right now. Even over Native itself. I saw someone tweet the other day that there's far more jobs in React Native than there are in the other ones. I don't know if that's true, but that's what they claimed. So yeah, you're in the right place if you're listening to this podcast and if you're working in React Native.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. I believe that was from Adnan. He created a community called Native Weekly where he has a community for React Native Devs to get together and ask questions, ask help within that. And then I believe every now and then he posts on his Twitter jobs that are out there and he'll sometimes compare it to flutter jobs that are out there. And he's always like, I'll just say for conversation, five react native jobs, no flutter jobs out this month sort of thing. So he seems to be highlighting that a lot, so that's for sure. Robin, what about you? What were some of your thoughts, general thoughts for 2025?

Robin Heinze:

Everything I'm seeing, I mean, talking about this focus on now performance and seeing a lot of focus on developer experience and dev tooling and debugging and profiling, it's all indicators to me that React Native has kind of made it. It's in its polish era for the Swifties out there. It's less about what features does React Native still need and more about, okay, now that we're good, we're stable, our architecture is the best it can be, let's focus on all of the other stuff, the polish, making everything fast and delightful as like I think RubyDev has always used that word, I think, about the experience of developing with React Native. And I love to see it. I really love to see it. I hope React Native is around for many years to come and is as stable and has as much longevity as Java or whatever.

But yeah, I'm really happy to see it sort of enter this era.

Mazen Chami:

React Native version 0.1,000 was just released.

Robin Heinze:

Oh, you know we're probably going to do a live stream or something. If they ever decide to release 1.0, that's our Super Bowl. It's our breaking news.

Josh Yoes:

We got to get fireworks or something. Yeah, for sure.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. Josh, what about you? What were some of your general thoughts for 2025?

Josh Yoes:

Yeah, I think a really interesting synergy happened in the React Native ecosystem this year where a lot of stability, a lot of the performance came, but kind of with a lot of the sort of agentic AI coding coming, React Native is really kind of, it keeps the highlighting its value of kind of that. It's 80% React. If you already know a little bit of React, you can write React Native and a lot of the community libraries still getting even more mature. I really saw a lot of vibe coding platforms use React Native as its preferred target. And in some ways it's cool to see new products. And I think a lot of people have maybe used an app that was having some troubles, it's a good prototype. But I think in general, when you see kind of a bigger swell of people coming into the programming community, that's always a boon.

So I think that was kind of really interesting to see where ... I know a lot of people also saw that kind of more closed things. I know JP did a lot of sort of vibe coding with Apple products and he found it a little bit harder because there's not as much code on the internet, simply put, that's public. So I think that was kind of something that I saw a lot, a lot of new products, a lot of new kind of innovation. So that was exciting for me to see.

Mazen Chami:

Awesome. Thank you for that all. And that's it for our episode. I think to kind of wrap up the year, Robin, do you have a mom joke to wrap up 2025?

Robin Heinze:

I do. And apologies since this will come out a little bit later in December, but we just got through Thanksgiving as we're recording this and so I couldn't help myself. It's a Thanksgiving theme joke. This is from Darren Wilson in our Jokes channel. What do you call the Ghost of Thanksgiving Turkey? A poultry geist.

Mazen Chami:

Oh, no. And that's 2025, folks.

Mazen Chami:

Oh man. Yeah. And thanks to everybody for coming along with us in this journey and hanging out with us here on our podcast. We really appreciate it. We don't always hear from people, obviously. Podcast is kind of a one-way medium, but when you folks do come up to us at conferences or send us a tweet or whatever, it makes us feel great. It's really nice to hear from people who do choose to spend some time with us every episode. And thanks. We really appreciate it.

Mazen Chami:

Including Josh, thank you for coming on the show. It was nice to have you on.

Robin Heinze:

So fun to have you on.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, this is great. Great job. Well, with that, Rec Native Radio fans, 2025 is over. Have a good new year and we'll see you next year.

Todd Werth:

As always, thanks to our editor, Todd Werth, our assistant editors, Jed Bartausky and Tyler Williams, our marketing and episode release coordinator, Justin Huskey and our guest coordinator, Mazen Chami. Our producers and hosts are Jamon Holmgren, Robin Heinze and Mazen Chami. Thanks to our sponsor, Infinite Red. Check us out at infinite.red/radio. A special thanks to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe to React Native Radio on all the major podcasting platforms.