2026-03-11 · #23
React Native Weekly #23 Expo Agent Beta, React Navigation 8.0, Hermes TypeScript Stripping and more
Expo Agent Beta Launch#
Expo has announced the beta release of its AI agent “Expo Agent” and opened a waitlist for sign-ups.
The Expo team built the agent on top of Claude Code with additional tuning, giving it deep knowledge of the Expo ecosystem, build pipelines, and native platform APIs for mobile app development.
It appears capable of handling things that React Native alone can’t cover — for example, implementing Watch app features natively in SwiftUI where needed.
🙌 Today we're thrilled to introduce the beta of Expo Agent. At Expo our mission has always been the same: to make it as delightful as possible to build beautiful, powerful native apps. Expo Agent represents massive progress in our pursuit of that mission. Watch the video
Introducing Expo Agent (beta): build native apps with Expo and AIDescribe the app you want. Expo Agent builds it. A real, shippable native app for iOS, Android, and the web. Join the waitlist to try the beta. Expo Blog
React Navigation 8.0 New Alpha Update Roundup#
A blog post summarizes the major changes since the first alpha release.
Practical features are steadily coming together, including the addition of inactiveBehavior to control inactive screen behavior, and support for SF Symbols and Material Symbols.
We have had many updates since our first alpha. So we wrote a post with more details. 📝 Highlights - inactiveBehavior to pause or unmount - Deep links by default in Static config - Standard schema in linking - SF and Material Symbol - Material themes And more… Read below 👇
react-native-unistyles v3.1 Released with Skills Support#
Unistyles v3.1 is out, bringing multiple new features including a lighter Babel plugin, the addition of StyleSheet.addChangeListener, and making react-native-edge-to-edge optional.
A coding agent Skill for Unistyles has also been added.
I've just released big Unistyles update! - smaller babel plugin - new public API: StyleSheet.addChangeListener - optional react-native-edge-to-edge - support for Nitro 0.35+ - better mocks with variants - fixed few bugs and memory leaks! Enjoy 🦄
Released new Unistyles v3 skill!
React Native Enriched 0.5.0 Adds HTML Normalizer Support#
React Native Enriched, a rich text editor library, now supports an HTML normalizer.
This allows pasted text to retain its original formatting when copied and pasted into the editor.
React Native Enriched 0.5.0 is out 🎉 One of the highlight features is the HTML normalizer. You can now copy text from pretty much anywhere, paste it into our input, and the formatting just stays intact. 🚀 Check 🧵for full release notes.
react-native-enriched-markdown v0.4.0 Released#
Version 0.4.0 of react-native-enriched-markdown, a Markdown renderer for React Native, is now available. This release adds LaTeX inline and block rendering, image caching on iOS/Android, and horizontal scrolling for wide LaTeX blocks.
𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚝-𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎-𝚎𝚗𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚍-𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚗 0.4.0 is out! 🚀 🔢 LaTeX Math Rendering — full inline/block support. Optional build-time flags to save ~2.5MB if you don't need it. 🖼️ Image Caching — memory + disk caching on iOS & Android. Faster re-renders and
RNRepo Adds iOS Support, Cutting Build Times by Up to 75%#
RNRepo, which previously supported Android only, has added iOS support. By leveraging pre-built artifacts, build times can now be reduced by up to 75%.
RNRepo cuts build times by up to 75% using pre-built artifacts. ⚡️ We finally shipped iOS support last week. See the 4x speed boost in practice – and try it yourself ⬇️
LegendList Scroll Optimization Update#
An optimization is in progress that reduces re-renders during upward scrolling to a single position update, with support planned for the next beta release.
I've been working on a big new optimization in LegendList - scrolling up only has to re-render one single position update! So scrolling up will be much smoother. Perfect for all of you making chat apps, which seems to be everyone 😂 For both web and mobile in the next beta 🎉
Hermes Natively Supports TypeScript Annotation Stripping#
Hermes can now natively strip TypeScript’s erasable annotations. This expands the range of TypeScript that can be processed without going through Babel.
Hermes finally has native support for stripping erasable TypeScript annotations (link to commit in next tweet).
expo-av Removed in Expo SDK 55 — Migrate to expo-video + expo-audio#
expo-av has been completely removed in Expo SDK 55, making migration to expo-video and expo-audio mandatory. Software Mansion has published a migration guide based on a real production migration at Expensify, covering topics such as the separation of VideoPlayer and VideoView, and event-based state management.
expo-av is fully removed in Expo SDK 55. The path forward is expo-video + expo-audio. @swmansion Mansion shared a migration guide from a real production move (@expensify), including: ♢ VideoPlayer + VideoView split ♢ sync calls ♢ event-based state Great blog post:
react-native-worktree Released#
react-native-worktree, a Skill for AI agents, has been published. It’s a tool for running multiple AI agents in parallel development on the same React Native / Expo app — spinning up an independent Metro server per git worktree while coordinating device and simulator access via file-based locking. This means multiple AI agents working across git worktrees can develop simultaneously without Metro port conflicts.
Built a new skill + cli tool that makes it easy to use multiple agents at the same time with a single Expo app. It makes sure agents don't conflict with each other and swaps connected metro servers on the fly. Works on ios or android simulator. docs: github.com/aleqsio/react-nativ…
One More Thing#
With Expo Agent on the scene, the barrier for web frontend engineers looking to get into React Native is about to drop significantly!
Even without knowledge of SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose, you can now implement things like Watch app support — and if a single agent can handle everything from the build all the way through to releasing on the App Store and Google Play, this could be a huge push for anyone who’s thought “I want to build a mobile app, but the native side scares me off.”