CONTACT US

React Native 0.82: The New Architecture Era

Kinga Kwapisz
By Kinga Kwapisz
Cover of a guide titled NEXT.JS VERCEL COST OPTIMISATION GUIDE by Jakub Dakowicz and Chris Lojniewski, featuring insights on self-hosting Nextjs, with a red geometric background and Pagepro logo in the top left corner.
NEXT.JS VERCEL COST OPTIMIZATION GUIDE
Cut your hosting costs with simple and quick code tweaks.
Download
CHECK OUR CORE SERVICES
Next.js
Next.js
Development
Sanity
Development
Expo
Development
Text on a dark background reads React Native 0.82 The New Architecture Era with abstract outlines of screens and devices in the background.
Get a summary of this article in:

 

React Native 0.82 officially ends support for the old architecture. 

From now on, every project runs on the New Architecture. Trying to disable it (for example, by setting newArchEnabled=false on Android or installing CocoaPods with RCT_NEW_ARCH_ENABLED=0 on iOS) will cause React Native to now ignore those flags and use the new setup by default.

If your app still runs on the Legacy Architecture, upgrade to React Native 0.81 (or Expo SDK 54). These versions include migration tools and warnings to help you switch safely. Once the New Architecture is enabled and your app runs smoothly, move up to 0.82.

In case of a migration block, check with third-party library maintainers if one of your dependencies isn’t compatible and report framework-level issues via the React Native issue tracker.

Legacy APIs are still available in this release, but full removal begins in the next version.

Additional changes shipped with 0.82 include:

  • Hermes V1 (Experimental): A new Hermes engine is now available for testing. Early benchmarks show faster bundle loads and shorter time-to-interactive, though devs will need to build from source to try it.
  • React 19.1.1: React Native 0.82 ships with the latest stable React release to improve concurrent rendering and developer ergonomics.
  • DOM-like Node Refs: Native components now provide DOM-style nodes via refs. Before, you could only access a few methods like measure() or setNativeProps(). Now, you can traverse the UI tree or measure layout using familiar DOM APIs such as parentNode, children, and getBoundingClientRect()
  • Optimized Debug Builds for Android: A new debugOptimized build type speeds up development by offering near-production performance while keeping JavaScript debugging intact.
  • Web Performance APIs (Canary): React Native now includes an early implementation of several browser-style performance APIs. These tools let you measure and monitor runtime performance in your app, helping with telemetry and optimization. The data will soon appear directly in the Performance panel of React Native DevTools once it’s rolled out in a future release.

Read the full release notes

Need help with your React Native app? Contact us.

Subscribe to Frictionless, the weekly newsletter by our CEO, Chris Lojniewski, and stay on top of the news.

Article link copied

Close button

Related
Articles