React Native 0.76: The New Architecture is Here!

Hey Mobile Devs!

As the React Native ecosystem continues to evolve, developers are now greeted with the biggest update in recent times React Native 0.76, featuring the New Architecture enabled by default. This monumental shift modernizes the framework, significantly boosting performance and flexibility by integrating the latest advancements from React 18, a new renderer, and bridge-free communication with native modules.

Whether you're an experienced developer or just getting started with React Native, this release is set to streamline your workflow while offering more responsive and powerful applications. Let's dive into the key features and improvements that will redefine your mobile development experience.

What Does the New Architecture Offer?

1. Support for Modern React Features: The New Architecture fully supports Suspense, Transitions, automatic batching, and useLayoutEffect. These updates empower React Native to deliver more responsive and intuitive user experiences.
2. Synchronous Access with Native Modules: React Native’s New Native Module System eliminates the asynchronous bridge, allowing for synchronous communication between JavaScript and native interfaces. This direct access boosts performance and enables more complex functionality while maintaining type safety between JavaScript and native code.
3. Rewriting the Renderer: The New Renderer can handle updates across multiple threads, allowing low-priority UI changes to be interrupted by urgent events (like user input) without causing visual jank. Layouts can now be read and updated synchronously, solving issues that made complex UI behaviors difficult to achieve.
4. The Event Loop: The introduction of a well-defined event loop helps React Native align closely with web specifications, improving predictability, supporting new browser features, and enhancing React’s concurrency model.
5. Bridge-Free Communication: By removing the old asynchronous bridge, React Native apps now start faster, with fewer crashes and better debugging support.

New Features

Concurrent Features and React 18 Support

The New Architecture fully embraces React 18, including Suspense and useLayoutEffect. This allows developers to take advantage of transitions—a key feature of React 18—by distinguishing between urgent updates (like typing) and transition updates (such as UI changes triggered by user input). Using APIs like startTransition, developers can now separate these events for a smoother user experience.

Automatic Batching

React Native 0.76 also brings automatic batching from React 18, enabling React to batch state updates together, reducing unnecessary renders and improving performance. This means fewer intermediate states and faster rendering—especially useful when managing frequent state updates in complex apps.

useLayoutEffect

The New Architecture also adds full support for useLayoutEffect, enabling synchronous layout updates within React Native. In the past, layout information was read asynchronously, causing minor UI glitches, such as tooltips being displayed in the wrong position. Now, you can access layout information synchronously, ensuring smoother and more accurate UI updates.

Full Support for Suspense

React Native 0.76 includes full support for Suspense. This allows you to declaratively specify loading states for components that aren't yet ready, improving the user experience by prioritizing visible content while suspended parts load in the background.

That wraps up this edition of our newsletter! We hope you found these updates helpful and exciting for your journey as a mobile developer. Don't forget to connect with us on LinkedIn and share your thoughts or any questions you may have. Let’s continue building amazing mobile experiences together!