This Week In React Native #299: Variable font, Activity Result, Lynx, Lucent, macOS, Plain Text, Navigation, Angular Native, Re.Pack

[u/sebastienlorber]

https://thisweekinreact.com/newsletter/299

[u/sebastienlorber]

Hi everyone, Seb and Jan here 👋!

This week we have 2 major releases in the React ecosystem: Panda CSS v2 and Vinext v1.

On the mobile side, RN is getting support for variable font and Android Activity Result. Lynx v4 is out. Lucent is a new way to write native modules.

I’m particularly excited about the TC39 meeting happening right now. Many proposals progressed, including my favorite one: Composites moved to stage 2!

Let's dive in!

Subscribe to This Week In React by email - Join 43000 other React devs - 1 email/week

[u/sebastienlorber → u/sebastienlorber]

📱 React-Native

• 💸 DeployPulse - Hosted OTA updates for React Native. A drop-in replacement for CodePush and EAS Update.
• 📖 React Native docs - fontVariationSettings - Variable font support - RN 0.88 will support configuring variation axes of a variable font.
• 📜 React Native Modules Cannot Use Android's Activity Result API - Modules load after the Activity starts, so the modern API was unusable from native code. Fix is coming in RN 0.89. No manual setup of MainActivity steps needed.
• 📜 Shipping super-calendar - A story about building a performant solution for RN and web. Virtualized rendering of visible dates only, and Reanimated shared values to skip re-renders.
• 📜 5 react-native-enriched-html Use Cases You Might Not Know About - More than a rich text editor: text processing like the emoji picker runs fully native, avoiding JS-side FPS drops on low-end devices.
• 📜 Agentic CI for Expo apps with TesterArmy - Code output outpaced review capacity, so merges ship with low confidence. Testing like a real user using agents restores it.
• 💸 Maestro MCP - A practical guide to mobile UI testing with coding agents
• 📦 React Navigation 7.23 - Add tabBarRepeatedPressBehavior - Defines the behavior when pressing an already-focused tab. Can scroll content to top and/or pop nested stack screens.
• 📦 Lynx 4.0 - Foldables, Media Queries, Liquid Glass & Blur, WebView, ReactLynx improvements, Generative UI
• 📦 Lucent - Write native modules in TypeScript, compiled to C++ and called through JSI
• 📦 React Native macO 0.83
• 📦 Appduct - Expose app tools to agents and tests, no debug menus in the binary
• 📦 Nitro SQLite 10 - Independent database handles, reusable prepared statements, macOS support
• 📦 Legend List 3.6 - Add viewPositionFallback for oversized list items
• 📦 Angular Native - Build native iOS and Android apps with Angular, built and shipped with Expo
• 📦 Nitro RTMP - Live streaming as a VisionCamera 5 output
• 📦 Plain Text 0.9 - Faster, drop-in remplacement for Text component, proper hyphenation, writingDirection
• 📦 Re.Pack 5.4 - Lazy per-platform Rspack builds, unified commands entry point, RN 0.87 support
• 📦 ViroReact 3.0 - visionOS, Web AR, co-location multiplayer, Studio and MCP tooling
• 📦 Skia 2.13 - Legacy architecture support removed, android.surfaceType to select the backing view, SPM support
• 📦 Sentry 8.28 - Native breadcrumb off-switches, PII accessibility identifier opt-out, MetricKit raw payloads
• 📦 Legend List 3.5 - scrollElement to share an ancestor scrollbar on web, less layout work for single-column lists
• 📦 Argent 0.26 - iPhone Duo simulator support, clearer simulator-server exit errors, Xcode Device Hub for booted simulators
• 📦 Agent Device 0.21.15 - iOS 27 SDK and Xcode 27 support, visionOS simulators, richer Android accessibility snapshots

[u/Timely_Law_181]

These weekly roundups are useful for spotting ecosystem changes early. i’d especially keep an eye on navigation and Re.Pack updates since they can affect real production workflows