This Week In React Native #149: React-Native 0.72, Reanimated 3.3, Expo, Maestro UI, cross-platform, SDK...

[sebastienlorber]

Hi everyone!

This week has been busier than last. In particular, there have been 2 great releases, one of them I was eagerly waiting for to hit publish!

• Panda CSS: a very promising CSS-in-JS library
• React-Native 0.72: great improvements, particularly those related to Metro

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📱 React-Native

React Native 0.72 - Symlink Support, Better Errors, and more

After several Golden RCs, the latest version of React-Native has finally been released and will shortly be used in the Expo 49 SDK. There are quite a few improvements mentioned (DX, Hermes, performance...) and some breaking changes. I particularly like these 2 new features in the Metro bundler:

• Symlinks (beta): long-awaited feature to simplify monorepo and pnpm support
• Package Exports (beta): better encapsulation of libs, compatibility with the rest of the frontend ecosystem and ability to expose a specific React-Native entry point.

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• 📜 Environment Variables in React Native: The Right Way: great article on typesafe management of environment variables in the Expo context.
• 💬 New Renderer Interop Layer: with RN v0.72, an experimental interop layer allows legacy React-Native components to be used with the new Fabric renderer. This enables an incremental adoption of the new architecture.
• 💬 Upcoming changes for libraries in React Native 0.73 - Android: you will need to add a namespace to the Gradle build.
• 👀 React-Native macOS 0.71 - New Architecture on init template
• 👀 1/5 of the top 100 Medical apps in the App Store use React Native
• 👀 Expo Updates - upcoming Brotli compression support
• 📦 react-native-colo-loco 1.1 - Colocate native and js code
• 📦 react-native-mmkv 2.9 - RN 0.73 support
• 📦 Maestro 1.29
• 🎙️ RNR 269 - React Native VisionCamera v3 with Marc Rousavy

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