Hi everyone!
This week we continue to notice interesting activity around the upcoming <ViewTransition> component.
Expo is finally launching its universal cross-platform hosting solution, and Shopify shared interesting feedback on its usage of React Native.
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⚛️ React
Revealed: React's experimental animations API
Motion creator explains the animation tradeoffs of using View Transitions and why it makes sense for React to directly integrate it into its reconciler through a new <ViewTransition> component. This interactive post shows an early look at the upcoming React feature, including some of its current implementation details, and explains how it overlaps a bit with Motion layout animations.
Keep in mind this exciting new API is still in active development, subject to change, and new PRs keep landing, notably:
- 👀 React Core PR - Support only View Transitions v2: The new component will leverage recent v2 spec APIs such as
view-transition-class, requires Safari 18.2+, and still unsupported in Firefox. - 👀 React Core PR - View Transition Class Names based on event kind
- 👀 Next.js PR -
experimental.viewTransitionflag: You can try the feature in Next.js 15.2 canary 4.
- 💸 Product for Engineers - Product management is broken. Engineers can fix it
- 👀 React website PR - Upgrade to Next.js 15, React 19, enable React Compiler
- 👀 React Router Milestones: Now communicating what they hope to ship in upcoming releases. v7.2 should include initial RSC support (from loaders/actions), Server Actions, middleware.
- 👀 Adopting the compiler at Wakelet: Positive feedback, improving LCP and INP metrics. It did not magically solve all the perf issues, but was close to a “free lunch” experience.
- 📖 Next.js docs - Single-Page Applications with Next.js: This new page notably documents how the newly released SWR 2.3 now allows passing promises in
<SWRConfig fallback>, enabling you to seamlessly move data fetching from the client to the server. - 📜 Understanding React Server Components: A comprehensive and well-presented overview of RSCs.
- 📜 Accessibility essentials every front-end developer should know: Accessibility tips with React examples.
- 📜 Bloated React code? Try component hooks: Reduce cognitive load by extracting a component hook so that the component can solely focus on rendering.
- 📜 Make FormData and input names type-safe in React: Using hand-made TS, then using Effect.Schema and FP.
- 📜 Maybe don't navigate(-1) in Remix/React Router: Or how to navigate backward but ensure you never leave the current app.
- 📜 Should you use MobX-State-Tree with React in 2025?
- 📜 Become expert in React Query
- 📦 Next.js React Server Component Testing: An example repository of testing Next.js RSCs using MSW and Playwright.
- 📦 Nextra 4.0: The Next.js-based docs framework upgrades to App Router among many other things.
- 📦 Base UI 1.0.0-alpha.5
- 📦 Superglue 1.0 - React + Rails
- 🎥 Theo - All the ways HTML gets to your browser
- 🎥 Simeon Griggs - useOptimistic from React docs to production
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Meticulous is used by companies like Lattice, Bilt Rewards, Power and many others.
This post from our CTO sets out the context of why exhaustive testing can double engineering velocity.
📱 React-Native
Expo unveiled what we expected, the first-ever universal app-hosting platform that completes the vision of bringing the web DX to the cross-platform world. It enables us to seamlessly deploy Expo’s server-related features, notably Expo for Web, API Routes, and Universal React Server Components. It takes into account mobile app subtleties, such as syncing the backend/app versions. You can use either the CLI or CI (EAS Workflows). Under the hood, it’s using Cloudflare Workers. There’s a free plan.
Five years of React Native at Shopify
Shopify successfully migrated all their 6 apps to React Native, and shared a nuanced feedback summarizes well the tradeoffs of using React Native in practice. On the positive side we have: cross-platform support, performance, hot reloading, knowledge portability... You still need native knowledge, and a few things could be improved, such as the debugging experience and the ability to easily upgrade.
- 💸 WithFrame - React Native Templates to accelerate your app development
- 👀 Expo Router RSC Movies Demo
- 📜 Animated Loader with React Native Skia
- 📦 React Native 0.78 RC.0: This upcoming version upgrades to React 19! Note that the v0.77 stable release has been postponed until next week due to a bug.
- 📦 React Native 0.76.6
- 📦 React Query 5.63 - Allow useQuery and useQueries to unsubscribe from the query cache: Particularly useful to unsubscribe hidden RN stack screens (including querying), more powerful/granular than react-freeze.
- 📦 Input OTP Native - One Time Passcode input, unstyled and fully customizable
- 📦 Edge-to-Edge 1.3 - Transparent button navigation bar
- 📦 Skia 1.9 & 1.10 - tvOS support, new reconcilier, image sampling options
- 📦 Radon 1.2 - RN 0.77, Redux and React Query tools, local EAS builds
- 📦 Screens 4.5 - RN 0.77 support
- 📦 Gesture Handler 2.22 - RN 0.77 support, Text component
- 📦 Reanimated 3.16.7 - RN 0.77 support
- 🎥 Simon Grimm - The Missing Piece to Universal React Native
- 🎙️ React Universe On Air 46 - Lessons from Shopify's Migration to React Native with Mustafa Ali
- 🎙️ Rocket Ship 58 - React Native Games & Animations with Ben Awad
- 🎙️ RNR 318 - Maintaining Open Source Libraries at Software Mansion
🔀 Other
- 📣 WinterTC (TC55) - Technical Committee on Web-interoperable Server Runtimes: Supersede WinterCG, responsible for defining a Minimum Common API spec for server runtimes, aligned with web APIs.
- 📜 Build systems and bundlers: Rspack maintainer’s research on how build tools and bundlers implement their incremental mode.
- 📜 Everything You Need to Know About Node.js Type Stripping: Tradeoffs explained by the Node.js PR author, including why
.tsxfiles are not supported. - 📜 CSS text-box-trim - Take back space from above/below, achieve optical balance
- 📜 Updates to the customizable select API
- 📜 ECMAScript feature: import attributes
- 📦 Lightning CSS 1.29 - Support for view transitions level 2
- 📦 Bun 1.1.43 - S3 support, HTML bundling, V8 snapshots and more
🤭 Fun
See ya! 👋
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