OK OK I know what you're thinking, this was a while ago. Yeah, well, it's also right now! And every moment in the future until the destruction of earth, or at least YouTube's data centers. So check this playlist out, learn some things, be inspired, and plan accordingly for the apocalypse.

Andy Street (FB London) summarizes internal discussions exploring how to make react native apps performant by default. Not only will it give you clear insights into the current scheduling challenges, but will also help you understand the trade-offs of potential solutions. All up for discussion. Also check out his post on Android + Offscreen Alpha Compositing.

'Do you remember the last time React Native had 146 open pull requests and 614 open issues? Me neither :)
This is the result of a triage event organized by Christopher Dro Asheghian (@cdro). Thanks to everyone who participated!" - @mkonicek

Check your Github notifications to see if you were pinged on any of your open issues or pull requests :)

"This group is intended for high-signal discussions (such as design discussions, coordinating releases) between core contributors to React Native. It is visible to anyone but only members can post and comment."

A fantastic talk about some of the challenges React Native will face when building out a more robust gesture system.

Tweet: “what are some concerns / reservations people have about react native? working on a presentation where i will try to respond to them :)”

Lots of really valuable insight, check it out!

Quick three-minute video that shows you how to do use CodePush. You have three minutes, right? Also check out @axemclion's talk from ReactConf if you have more than 3 minutes. And if you've read this far, then check out Visual Studio Code - React Native too.

And what better timing to look at CodePush! Version 1.8.1-beta was just released and it includes a great new feature: "Updates can now be "flighted" to only a percentage of your users" with code-push release-react MyApp ios --rollout 25%

Also from @axemclion, check out this post on writing a custom debugger! It starts out with an explanation of how the Chrome debugger works, so it's still worth a read even if you aren't interested in building your own debugger :)

"This post is for those of you with a complex React application. If you're building something smaller, you might not need to focus on performance yet. Don't prematurely optimize! Go build things!" -- it's oriented towards React DOM but mostly applies to React Native anyways.

Also see part 2, "A Deep Dive into React Perf Debugging"

"In a NYC meetup, members from This AM (4.5 stars, 75 reviews) describe their experience creating a production app with react native. There's a couple particularly interesting nuggets in here, such as defining Images with percentage based dimensions and testing with Jest/Calabasas."

"The NFL web team maintains nine React projects in one monolithic repository. As much as we want to keep them all shiny and up to date, it just isn’t feasible (or sane) to comb through that much code every time there’s a new syntax for refs or a new routing paradigm.." -- codemods to the rescue?

Totally unrelated to this newsletter but wow am I excited.

Has anybody explored VR with React Native, perhaps with the Gear VR? Let me know on Twitter @notbrent. (Related: Eric Florenzano's talk "React, Meet Virtual Reality" from ReactConf)

A succinct guide for beginners to familiarize themselves with how to debug React Native apps -- if you know how to use the dev menu and its various options already, there probably isn't much for you here though! Nice shoutout to @niftylettuce's Frappe, which lets you trigger reload / debug / plain old shake on your device Android device with the hotkeys.

"Bonnie Eisenman presents an introduction on React Native, how to get started, and how to get your app into the store." -- Bonnie is the author of Learning React Native, so yeah she knows how to write. Send this to a friend that does not yet grok React Native.

Navigator is the source of a lot of confusion with React Native, @dabit3 takes the time here to give beginners an overview of what it can do for you and how to use it. Important to note that @ericvicenti's new Navigation library is in the experimental stage but poised to become the official supported solution soon.

One of the great things about waiting long enough to send out a new issue of the newsletter is that now part 2 of this post is available as well! Part 1 is about the visuals, part 2 is about Redux & friends.

And it ships with hot reloading! 🎉"

Lots of other features and fixes added, click through to see the release notes written by Mateusz Zatorski (@knowbody)!

I think you understand what this means based off of the title.

"We'd plan to build the NavigationLegacyNavigator that is meant to replace Navigator seemlessly without API changes. While the APIs remain compatible with Navigator, it should be built with the new Navigation API such as NavigationAnimatedView...etc.

To ensure that the new NavigationLegacyNavigagtor delivers the same UX and maintains APIs compability, we'd start with using the exact same examples as the same ones that Navigator uses."

You'll notice that when you close and reopen the UIExplorer now that it jumps right back to where you were before -- a nice feature of NavigationExperimental :)

"New prop hitSlop allows extending the touch area of Touchable components. This makes it easier to touch small buttons without needing to change your styles.

It takes top, bottom, left, and right same as the pressRetentionOffset prop. When a touch is moved, hitSlop is combined with pressRetentionOffset to determine how far the touch can move off the button before deactivating the button."

Usage: hitSlop={{top: 30, bottom: 30, left: 60, right: 60}} -- this is very useful!

@astreet's progress on WebWorkers marches on! I mention this commit for two reasons 1) being able to make native calls from workers greatly increases their utility 2) to remind you that you should read Andy's fantastic "React Native Scheduling" post to better understand the motivation behind implementing workers (hint: "The main piece of infra we're exploring running in a web worker is parts of Relay.")

Maybe this should have been a module instead, a modulo module.

Nice easy way to blur images!

"This is the first from the series of PRs I'm going to be sending shorty that would let Animated.js animations to run off the JS thread (for Android only)."

This is the second most upvoted pain on ProductPains so it's great to see this moving forward! Still more work to be done but thank you @kmagiera for everything!

"When vjeux asked me how the documentation changes looked, it wasn't obvious to me how to build and view them locally. So, I thought it might be a good idea to add instructions to the contributing document."

Danke to @geirman contributing to the docs is easier than ever :)

"Build incredible real-time applications in record time." -- click through and scroll down to the code sample section for a React Native specific example. Made by a couple of fellow Canadians -- @ekryski and @corymsmith (who also built react-native-icons). Good work eh.

"Realm is a database built from the ground up for the unique challenges of mobile app development, that runs directly inside phones, tablets or wearables. We launched for Java, Objective‑C, & Swift in 2014, and are now used on hundreds of millions of devices today by appmakers including Starbucks, Cisco, Walmart, Google, Amazon, & eBay, plus many many others."

Now with official support for React Native!

An example from the Relay repo that uses React Native to build a TodoMVC app with Relay and GraphQL

And now an example of using Relay and React Native with the GraphQL-backend-as-a-service tool Reindex, to build a "a multi-user gallery app, with file uploads." -- similar basic functionality to something like Instagram.

"Monitor device state in a react-native app without boilerplate." -- a Reacty way to handle keyboard, appstate, viewport and connectivity changes, neato.

"An unofficial basic implementation of the BBC News app built using React Native"

"React Native Carousel control with support for iOS and Android"

"Country picker provides a modal allowing a user to select a country from a list. It display a flag next to each country name."

With Exponent you can create a new React Native project in one click and deploy it with a second click, making it available to anyone else who has the Exponent app (available on the App Store and Play Store). On Android, each of the apps opens in a new activity in the multi-tasker and can be saved to the home screen, like any other app. Over the next few months we will be rolling out other exciting features like dead-simple push notifications and support for popular native modules.

Also I work at Exponent and I took a few hours off today to finish this newsletter, so thank you ^

I love these folks. They make rnplay.org possible and in doing so support the React Native community in a big way. They are also allowing us to use their simulators within the React Native docs! I am not paid to advertise for them, I'm happy to advocate for products that I believe in (see: this newsletter about React Native) - so check them out if you have any need for an in-browser simulator for iOS or Android! Go and upload an app, the first 100 minutes of simulator use are free!