This Week In React 274

⚛️ Next.js, React Router, Storybook, HeroUI, Remotion, Lucide, useEffect | 📱 Reanimated, Worklets, Nitro Fetch, Navigation, Rozenite, MMKV, Windows, Swift | 🔀 TypeScript, Signals, Zero, Valibot

Hi everyone, Seb here 👋!

This week: a new Next.js release, a React Aria-based UI library, Remotion updates, Storybook MCP, and more.

On React Native, multi-threading keeps improving (Worklets, Reanimated), and React Navigation v8 looks close.

Sorry for the weird duplicate email last week, just a mistake 😅

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

• 🦋 Bluesky

• ✖️ X / Twitter

• 👔 LinkedIn

• 👽 Reddit

Jack HerringtonPrincipal Engineer - Youtuber

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⚛️ React

Next.js 16.2

A great minor release that comes with significant performance improvements, but also impactful DX improvements and new interesting features:

• ~400% faster next dev startup

• ~50% faster rendering thanks to a React core RSC contribution

• Redesigned error page

• Server Function logging in dev

• next dev --inspect to attach a Node.js debugger

• Link transitionTypes

• Dev Overlay now renders Error.cause and a hydration diff indicator to identify client/server

• Many new experimental features

• AI improvements: generates AGENTS.md to read versioned docs for agents, browser log forwarding, agent devtools CLI.

• Turbopack improvements: Faster builds, Server Fast Refresh, tree shaking of dynamic imports, PostCSS config, Subresource Integrity, inline loader config, and more.

Related resources:

• 📜Implementing Next.js 16 ‘use cache’ with next-intl Internationalization - Recently updated to include usage of the new experimental.rootParams feature, letting cached components read the locale directly instead of receiving it as a prop.

• 📜 Error Handling in Next.js with catchError - This new unstable_catchError() API is a framework-aware alternative to react-error-boundary that discards Next.js control flow errors and can refetch RSC data.

• 🎥 Ankita Kulkarni - Next.js 16.2 Just Changed AI Coding Forever

• 💸 Product for Engineers - WTF does a product manager do? (and why engineers should care)

• 📜 Start naming your useEffect functions, you will thank me later - Advocates for giving an inline name to Effect functions to convey your intent, even if it’s encapsulated within a custom hook. If you can’t find a decent name, maybe the Effect does too much or should not exist.

• 📜 use(): The Hook That Breaks the Rules (On Purpose)

• 📜 Test IDs are an a11y smell

• 📜 Type Safety in React Router

• 📜 Post-React Compiler React Coding Guide (For AI Agents)

• 💸 Sentry - Why your Next.js stack traces point to random chunks (and how to fix it)

• 📦 React Router 7.13.1 & 7.13.2 - Recent patches introduced new unstable APIs such as the getRequest() API for RSCs, and a future flag to access “pass-through” (un-normalized) Request objects. The <Link unstable_mask> makes it easier to implement URL masking, letting you replicate Instagram-like UX: open gallery images in a modal, and render them full screen on refresh.

• 📦 HeroUI 3.0 - We usually don’t feature most UI libraries, but this one, based on React Aria and Tailwind, has been cooking for a while, and looks more polished than the average UI lib. Although it’s not a cross-platform abstraction, it offers a React Native variant using similar composition patterns and design tokens.

• 📦 Storybook 10.3 - MCP, Vite 8, Next.js 16.2, ESLint 10 - There’s a dedicated article on the Storybook MCP for React.

• 📦 Lucide Icons 1.0 - Quite popular icon solution in React and shacn/ui.

• 📦 Lexical 0.42 - Extensible text editor framework from Meta

• 📦 Hiraki - Zero-dependency React drawer component

• 📦 json-render Ink - Generative UI for the terminal, comes with 27 React components

• 🎥 Jonny Burger - Remotion is getting even better! - Cool features landed recently in the React video creation tool, such as Light Leaks, Sound Effects, Rspack, and AI-related improvements. Let’s not forget the integration with Vercel Sandbox: I wouldn’t be surprised if we could soon fully vibe-code videos directly in the cloud.

Evan BaconEngineering Manager - Expo

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📱 React-Native

Worklets 0.8 - Shareable, Bundle mode improvements

It’s now easier to use the Bundle mode, which unlocks running more complex things in background threads. Also read the dedicated article on Shareable – shared memory’s missing piece, a runtime-bound shared memory primitive that was extracted from Reanimated, and that you can now use for non-animation use cases too!

• 💸 Make React apps fast where it actually matters. Learn how to diagnose real bottlenecks and fix slow, janky React apps using modern React 19 patterns.

• 🔐 Glassworm Strikes Popular React Native Phone Number Packages in Supply Chain Attack - Affects react-native-country-select and react-native-international-phone-number.

• 📜 Glow Effect on TextInput with Reanimated CSS Animations

• 📜 From skeptic to convert: how Fieldy adopted Expo for their AI wearable

• 📦 Reanimated 4.3 - CSS animations for SVG, Shared Values on multiple threads, typesafety

• 📦 React Navigation 7.17 - New .with() method on static config to add a wrapper around the navigator - Also available in v8.alpha. React Navigation wants us to use the Static API more. It unlocks automatic type inference and deep linking, and yet covers most dynamic use cases.

• 📦 React Native Navigation SDK - TIL that Google provides an official React Native library for Google Maps (in beta).

• 📦 Swift 6.3 - C interop, module selectors, Swift Build preview, Android SDK, and more

• 📦 Nitro Fetch 0.2 - Add support for Streaming, formData, AbortController, RN 0.85

• 📦 React Native Windows 0.82 - New-Architecture only

• 📦 Rozenite 1.5 & 1.6 - DevTools for AI Agents, new File System plugin

• 📦 MMKV 4.3 - MMKV upgrade, compareBeforeSet optimization, configure default log level at build time

• 📦 Uniwind 1.6 - Border curve utilities

• 📦 Detox 20.48-50 - Support simulator launch --arch, liquidGlass overlay

• 📦 Agent Device 0.10 - Can control macOS apps

• 🎥 Beto - React Navigation v8 Crash Course — Liquid Glass, Tabs & More

• 🎥 notJust.dev - State of React Native - What’s new in 2026

• 🎙️ RNR 357 - React Native 0.82–0.84 & Expo 55

🔀 Other

• 📜 Fix Flaky Jest Tests in CI with maxWorkers (and why it works) - Tests parallelization can lead to timeouts, but you can fine-tune parameters to reduce test time and flakiness.

• 📜 Who Is Responsible for AI-Generated Code? - Will Node.js ban AI-generated code from its core, even when there’s a human in the loop?

• 📜 The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat

• 📦 TypeScript 6.0 - A “bridge” release toward the 7.0 Go rewrite, which is almost complete. This release also changes defaults (strict: true, types: []...), improves subpath imports, adds types for Temporal and upsert, and more.

• 📦 Mixed Signals - Bridging the Server-Client Boundary with Signals - The Preact team is working on a new transport-agnostic solution in which the reactive signal graph spans the network boundary.

• 📦 Edge.js - Running Node apps inside a WebAssembly Sandbox

• 📦 Zero 1.0 - Sync engine is now stable e

• 📦 ArrowJS - UI framework for the agentic era

• 📦 Valibot 1.3 - Smarter pipelines, result caching, and new validators

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋