This Week In React 271

Vinext, RSC, Activity, Async React, Next.js, TanStack | Expo 55, Router, Survey, Enriched, Maestro, Metro, Sparkling, Grab, Brownfield | TC39, Temporal, Navigation, npmx, Bun, Deno, Solid

Hi everyone!

This week is rather quiet in the React world, so we took a step back on Vinext, found great community blog posts, and weak signals.

On the React Native side, let’s welcome our new author, Jan Jaworski, who covered the new Expo SDK and the State of React Native survey results, among many other things.

Let’s dive in!

As always, thanks for supporting us on your favorite platform:

• 🦋 Bluesky

• ✖️ X / Twitter

• 👔 LinkedIn

• 👽 Reddit

Dominik DorfmeisterWeb Developer - React-Query maintainer

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⚛️ React

What is Vinext really worth?

Last week, we covered Vinext, Cloudflare’s AI-driven reimplementation of Next.js on top of Vite. Now that the dust has settled, let’s see what the community and the Next.js team have to say.

• 🔐 Vibe-Hacking Cloudflare’s Vibe-Coded Next.js Replacement - Show that AI-generated code passing functional tests can still miss security hardening, and automated AI tooling can help find those vulnerabilities.

• 🐦 Guillermo Rauch - “We’ve identified, responsibly disclosed, and confirmed 2 critical, 2 high, 2 medium, 1 low security vulnerabilities”

• 🐦 Jimmy Lai mentions that Vinext’s 94% API coverage is misleading - In reality, Vinext only passes a limited number of the 13,000+ Next.js test suite (13% dev, 20% e2e, 10% production). Many edge cases are likely misbehaving.

• 🐦 The cio.gov website using Vinext is “basically a static site” - This deployment doesn’t really dogfood the whole API surface of Next.js.

• 📖 Vercel docs - Migrate to Vercel from Cloudflare - It’s no secret that Vercel/Cloudflare CEOs do not like each other. The timing of this newly published docs page feels… noteworthy.

• 🎥 Fireship - Cloudflare just slop forked Next.js

While the AI-generated port is undeniably impressive, it’s likely too early to adopt it in production. It also remains unclear whether Cloudflare intends to support the project over the long term and make it production-ready.

• 💸 Next.js minifies your code into mush. Source maps fix that. Learn how to wire up Sentry so your stack traces are actually readable

• 📣 Linux Foundation Announces the Formation of the React Foundation

• 👀 React.dev PR - Add RSC Sandboxes - The React docs website has merged infrastructure to run full-stack interactive playgrounds. However, it hasn’t been used on any public page yet. The server-related features (RSC, async components, use, Suspense, Server Functions, Actions, streaming) run locally in a Web Worker.

• 👀 Oxlint + React Compiler Rules integration demo - Oxlint supports loading ESLint plugins via the jsPlugins, so technically it can run the React Compiler rules too.

• 📖 <ViewTransition> docs - New example - Animating enter/exit with Activity

• 💬 Next.js issue - Server requests and latency increased after upgrading from Next.js 15 to 16 - Users noticed an increase in server requests after upgrading. Andrew explains this is due to a new fine-grained segment prefetching system that maximizes caching efficiency. A new prefetchInlining flag is coming to give you control over this behavior until they implement a sensible heuristic.

• 💬 Devon from React Aria explains the limits of the native <dialog> vs JS/React abstractions

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• 📜 Error rendering with RSC - Great deep-dive into how errors flow through the 3 RSC rendering environments (RSC server, SSR, browser). Only the browser supports Error Boundaries, so RSC/SSR errors need a clear path to reach the client side and get displayed.

• 📜 Understanding Why React Fiber Exists - Greatly explains why React abandoned recursive reconciliation in favor of the Fiber architecture, making it possible to pause rendering and accept new user inputs.

• 📜 React is changing the game for streaming apps with the Activity component - Practical use case for <Activity> to preserve playback state when hiding video/audio players. Don’t forget to pause the player using an Effect cleanup function.

• 📜 Frontend Memory Leaks: A 500-Repository Static Analysis - A study scanned 500 repos across many frameworks and breaks down the results. Gives an overview of the most frequent React-related memory leaks, notably the lack of a useEffect cleanup function.

• 📜 Create a Per-Request Database Instance with React Router Middleware - Shows how to wrap each request in a database transaction.

• 💸 Certificates.dev - Validate your cross-stack capability with a comprehensive Certification for Laravel. Limited-time launch offer: 40% off!

• 📦 TanStack Store 0.9 - API breaking changes, using faster alien-signals library

• 📦 Vite Plugin React beta.0 - Drop Vite 7 support, remove Babel dependency

• 📦 Next-translate 3.0 - Turbopack, Next.js 16, and a New Chapter

• 📦 React-Admin 5.12, 5.13, 5.14 - February 2026 Update

• 🎥 Jack Herrington - TanStack Start SSR: 3 Reasons To Love It

• 🎥 Josef Bender - New TanStack Package: Exclusive First Look

• 🎙️ This Month in React 2026-02 - CloudFlare remakes Next with AI; Vercel big mad. We talk too much about AI Agents

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📱 React-Native

Expo SDK 55

Expo SDK 55 is out now as a stable release! It brings React Native 0.83, React 19.2, Expo Router 55, and a massive amount of improvements across the entire ecosystem.

React Native 0.82 & 0.83 Highlights:

• The New Architecture is now a requirement. You can try out new AI skills to help you with the update process.

• React 19.2 Integration: Brings the new <Activity> API (for preserving state in hidden component trees) and useEffectEvent.

• DOM Node APIs: Native components now provide DOM-like nodes via refs, allowing you to traverse the UI tree and measure layouts just like on the web.

• Revamped DevTools: A brand-new DevTools desktop app that no longer requires a browser, featuring dedicated Network and Performance panels. Web Performance APIs are also now stable.

• Optimized Android Debugging: A new debugOptimized build type speeds up your dev environment, allowing animations and re-renders to hit ~60FPS while still allowing JS debugging.

• Experimental Hermes V1: Available as an opt-in, bringing meaningful performance improvements for bundle loading and Time to Interactive (TTI).

Expo SDK 55 Highlights:

• Expo Router v55 with Native Features: Added support for the native Apple Zoom transition, a new iOS Stack.Toolbar API, experimental SplitView, and a new Colors API for dynamic Material 3 and adaptive iOS colors. Yes, the versioning scheme has changed: it’s v55, not v7.

• AI Tooling: You can try out new AI skills to help you with the update process. Expo also introduced Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools for CLI actions/EAS services, alongside the official expo/skills repository.

• Developer Experience: A small but welcome improvement is the ability to discover active dev servers on iOS with no QR code scanning needed!

• Smaller OTA updates: ship up to 75% smaller OTA updates thanks to Hermes bytecode bundle diffing.

This release also shapes the future of video in React Native. The legacy expo-av module has been removed and replaced by expo-video & expo-audio, which feature an improved API, synchronous calls, and better state management with atomic state updates.

State of React Native 2025

The results for the State of React Native 2025 survey are officially out! This year marks the 10th anniversary of React Native, alongside hitting a massive milestone of 4 million weekly downloads (double last year’s numbers!). The ecosystem is maturing rapidly, and the survey reflects a highly positive shift in the overall developer experience. Software Mansion devs break it down on their YouTube channel.

Here are some of the highlights that we’ve found interesting:

• The New Architecture Era: The New Architecture is now the default and has already reached an impressive ~80% adoption rate. Combined with recent React Native releases shipping with zero user-facing breaking changes, the dreaded “upgrade pain” is finally fading into the past.

• Navigation: React Navigation and Expo Router dominate the space. While deep linking and TypeScript inference remain the top developer pain points, upcoming updates (like React Navigation 8) are specifically targeting these exact issues. We are also seeing a massive push toward new native primitives like native tabs, split views, and zoom transitions.

• Styling: The community is heavily leaning into Tailwind-style utility classes (NativeWind) and react-native-unistyles. While the “lack of a standard CSS API” was a top complaint, React Native is rapidly closing the gap by shipping web-compatible features natively—like box shadows, gradients, and CSS filters—with more on the way.

• Graphics & Animations: React Native Reanimated remains the undisputed king of animations, with developers highly praising the new Shared Element Transitions. Meanwhile, React Native Skia is maturing fast, empowering developers to build much more ambitious and performant custom graphics without native code.

• Community Stewardship: With the recent launch of the independent React Foundation (hosted by the Linux Foundation), the future stewardship of React Native looks incredibly stable.

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• 📊 State of Subscription Apps 2025: Revenue by mobile app framework shows that React Native apps perform the best in earnings.

• 👀 Vision Camera 5 preview - The upcoming release now has a dedicated documentation section detailing its new features.

• 💬 AbortController RFC - A proposal to better align React Native’s implementation with the web standard and support the missing APIs.

• 🐦 RNRepo now supports iOS - Faster build times thanks to pre-built library artifacts.

• 🐦 React Native Worktree skill - enables multiple agents to use simulators without conflicts

• 📜 Sparkling: The Missing App Layer for Lynx.js? - The Callstack team explores the previously mentioned Lynx framework.

• 📜 Building reliable AI Chat on mobile - An insight into the challenges of building a great user experience for mobile AI chat interfaces. Also announcing a FlatList-compatible library to address these challenges.

• 📜 Expo UI tips - Non-obvious solutions and techniques to make your app make use of native features to look and feel better.

• 📜 React Native Monorepo with PNPM Workspaces

• 📦 @native-html/render - Render HTML as native views - This old package has been refreshed and is now officially maintained by Software Mansion.

• 📦 Grab - Touch-to-grab context tool for React Native UI changes - Similar to React-Grab on the web, this convenient tool permits giving accurate context to LLMs.

• 📦 Nitro 0.34, and Nitro 0.35 with an API breaking change to fix a memory leak issue.

• 📦 Enriched 0.5 - HTML normalizer, preserve rich formatting, and more

• 📦 Enriched Markdown 0.3 - RTL support, GFM support (tables, task lists, and autolinks)

• 📦 Brownfield 3.0 - New Expo Config plugin

• 📦 Maestro CLI 2.2 - Visual Testing capabilities

• 📦 Metro 0.84.1 - HTTPS support in Metro server

• 📦 Uniwind 1.4 - Scoped theme

• 📦 Boost 1.0 - A Babel plugin that automatically optimizes your apps

• 📦 Agent Device 0.7 - TV support, push notifications, clipboard commands, network dump, dogfood skill

• 🎙️ React Native Radio 354 - React Native Screens with Krzysztof Magiera - Deep dive and sneak peek into the upcoming 5.0 rewrite built exclusively for the New Architecture.

🔀 Other

• 👀 TC39 - Agenda for the 113th meeting - 10-12 March - Next week, major proposals such as Temporal and Explicit Resource Management could move to stage 4.

• 📣 Navigation API - a better way to navigate, is now Baseline Newly Available - The modern alternative to the History API is ready for prime time. Part of Interop 2026, the remaining browser incompatibilities should be fixed by the end of the year.

• 📣 Announcing npmx: a fast, modern browser for the npm registry

• 📦 Firefox 148 - Unlocks cross-browser support for CSS shape(), position-try-order, and Trusted Types to prevent XSS attacks. Speaking of XSS, Firefox is also the first browser to land the new Sanitizer API and setHTML().

• 📦 Bun 1.3.10 - New REPL, ES decorators, faster event loop, barrel optimization, and more

• 📦 Deno 2.7 - Temporal API, Windows ARM, and npm overrides

• 📦 Solid 2.0 beta - Async is first‑class, computations can return Promise, the graph knows how to suspend/resume

• 📦 Better Auth 1.5 - New CLI, OAuth 2.1 Provider, Electron integration, i18n support, and more

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋