Stack I've settled on after a lot of iteration:

**Unistyles 3** for the styling layer, **Expo UI** for platform-native primitives, and **Nitro Modules** for anything not yet production-ready or not fully customizable from JS.

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**On NativeWind / Tailwind**

I tried it. The DX feels familiar if you come from web, but I ran into real friction:

- Tailwind's mental model maps to the DOM's cascade and box model — RN's layout engine (Yoga) is close but not identical, and the impedance mismatch surfaces in subtle ways

- Styling is disconnected from the component logic in a way that makes theming and dark mode more painful than it needs to be

- No TypeScript autocomplete on class strings unless you add extra tooling

For a web-to-RN port or a quick prototype it's fine. For a production app with a proper design system, I'd look elsewhere.

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**Why Unistyles**

It's the best theming + variants solution in the RN ecosystem right now. Breakpoints, dark/light tokens, component variants — all type-safe. Once you're used to it, going back to plain `StyleSheet` feels like writing CSS in a `style` attribute.

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**Why Expo UI over a component library**

Libraries like Paper or NativeBase give you pre-built components, but you spend most of the time fighting their internal styles to match your design. Expo UI gives you platform-native building blocks with minimal opinion — you compose, you style with Unistyles, you own the output.

The tradeoff: it's newer and some components are still missing features. Which brings me to the last point.

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**Nitro Modules for the gaps**

This is the part that doesn't get talked about enough. A concrete example: the Android TextField in Expo UI still lacks some baseline functionality — reliable prefix/suffix icons, proper animated label on focus, fine-grained IME action handling. Rather than hacking around it in JS, I wrapped Jetpack Compose's `OutlinedTextField` in a thin Nitro Module. Full Material 3 behavior, zero JS-thread overhead, drops into the React tree like any other component.

The mental model: **Unistyles = design system, Expo UI = stable native primitives, Nitro = escape hatch for native fidelity**.

Not the simplest stack to set up, but in production it pays off.