Roadmap

This document outlines some of the upcoming plans for React Native. Since React Native is a fast-moving project with a large amount of community contribution, this roadmap doesn't include everything that will go into React Native.

The React Native roadmap can be broken down into three key priorities: adding functionality to the core libraries, improving the core performance and stability of React Native, and making the developer experience better.

Core Libraries

• Complete Apple TV support. Owners: douglowder. ETA: January
  • Building for Apple TV is now possible. Before this item can be marked as finished, we need to update the react-native cli to support launching apps on Apple TV, and document how to get started.
• Better maps. Owner: Leland Richardson. ETA: March
  • Since the plan is to make the react-native-maps module the officially recommended maps solution for the React Native community, we need more features to be considered complete. We want iOS support for MapKit, Google Maps, and Mapbox and Android support for Google maps and Mapbox. In particular this should improve quality in China.
• An Improved ListView. Owner: Spencer Ahrens. ETA: Completed
• A standard navigation library for hybrid apps. Owners: Leland Richardson. ETA: Completed
  • A navigation library specifically designed for applications that are part native, part React Native. We are pretty sure the right solution involves a different navigation library. Once this is released and stable, we can deprecate NavigatorIOS.
• A new standard navigation library. Owners: skevy, ericvicenti. ETA: Completed
• Smoother animations. Owners: ji, janicduplessis. ETA: Completed

Core Performance

• Turn on Nodes by default for new React Native apps. Owner: Aaron Chiu. ETA: June
  • Nodes is a new mechanism for layout that should improve performance and fix several longstanding dysfunctions.
  • It's currently available but has to be explicitly enabled. We need it to be compatible with existing features before flipping it to the default.
• Significantly improve performance, focusing on Android. Owner: Aaron Chiu. ETA: June
  • There's a number of performance improvements so this breaks down into a lot of smaller issues.
• Improved packager. Owner: Christoph Pojer. ETA: Completed
  • We are working on further improving stability, reliability and performance of React Native's packager. The packager has now been moved out of core React Native: introducing Metro Bundler.
• Share C++ code between Android and iOS bridges. Owner Marc Horowitz. ETA: Completed, available in 0.44
  • Building the C++ bridge on top of a common code base reduces code duplication, makes the two platforms more consistent, makes it faster to iterate on the lower layers of the bridge, and enables efficient use of cross-platform C++ modules.
  • For code using documented React Native interfaces, this should be an invisible change.

Developer Experience

• Faster app reloads during development. Owners: cpojer. ETA: March
  • We'll focus on rewriting packager internals and building updatable bundles so that in development mode only the changed files have to be sent to the device.
• Better templates for creating new apps. Owners: Martin Konicek, Héctor Ramos. ETA: June
  • Xcode, for example, lets you create a new app with stack or tab navigation via UI. It should be easy to do this in React Native too.
  • Martin Konicek has already implemented this and it is now available, but we have yet to write documentation. Héctor is working on some default templates.
• A new React Native tutorial. Owner: Héctor Ramos. ETA: June
  • Currently there is a tutorial but it is doing double duty as reference material because it doesn't really read linearly. The idea of this new tutorial is to take you through building a reasonable sample app.
• A better "create-react-native-app" workflow. Owners: Adam Perry, Héctor Ramos. ETA: Completed
  • The goal is to make it simpler to set up new applications. It should be possible to create a new React Native app without first installing Xcode or Android Studio.

Thanks to all the individuals and companies helping out with the projects on this roadmap!

If you have suggestions for features that you think would be valuable on the roadmap, check out Canny, where you can suggest new features and discuss existing proposals, or contact @hectorramos.