On February 19th, 2025, React Native team released the 0.78 update. This new release incorporates React 19, bringing features like Actions for managing asynchronous transitions, useActionState and useOptimistic hooks, the use API for accessing resources during render, and the ability to pass ref as props without forwardRef. Depreciated APIs, such as propTypes were also removed.
Other changes introduced in the update include:
- React Compiler now optimizes applications by automatically applying memoization. Enabling it now requires only installing the compiler and configuring the Babel plugin. Memoized components have the
Memo ✨tag in the Component Inspector. - In response to user feedback, an opt-in feature restores JavaScript log streaming via the Metro dev server. Developers can enable this by using the
--client-logsflag when starting the server. - The Image component now supports loading Android vector and shape drawables as XML resources, allowing for scalable vector images without quality loss. These resources can be imported like other static assets in the source prop.
According to the release, in 2025 React Native team plans to deliver smaller stable releases more often to reduce breaking changes and deliver bug fixes and new features faster.
Read the full release notes here.
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