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Just found out I was the #9 top contributor on the @reactnative core repo last year according to GitHub Insights. Even more exciting, if you exclude Meta employees, I'm #1!🎉
Super thankful for the amazing support from the React Native community.
Spent all week with 37 Claude agents grinding in parallel, 18 hours a day, until they fully reverse engineered @expo.
sharing the results so you don’t have to burn the tokens. 100% free and open-source:
github.com/expo/expo
E se adicionar React Native em QUALQUER app fosse tão simples quanto instalar uma lib?
Animado pra trocar uma ideia sobre Expo brownfield, React Native e como foi o processo pra integrar rn em mais de 100 apps open-source
Vejo vocês dia 28 de novembro no Front in Floripa!
🚀 Direto da @expo!
O grande @donadeldev está confirmadíssimo no Front in Floripa.
Software Engineer na @expo, Gabriel vai nos mostrar as últimas novidades de como fazer apps com IA.
Restam somente uns 40 ingressos 😲 Então corrrreee 👇
➡️ frontin.floripa.br
Gabriel Donadel retweeted
I hate how imprecise the term “native” has become.
Is a UIKit app that mostly displays WebViews, such as Apple News, not a native app? What about an app that’s entirely rendered with UIKit or SwiftUI, but orchestrated by a bytecode file, as with React Native? How about a social network app that’s so server-driven it makes network round-trips before navigation?
Do you trust that an app built with UIKit is doing concurrency better than the reasonable defaults of SwiftUI?
Today, software is developed in natural language. When you use imprecise prompts, you get sloppy results. I ban my agents from using the term “native” to describe technical details.
Your agent will inherit your principles, so why allow any room for ambiguity?
Reject technical imprecision. Be curious about performance characteristics, and strive for data-backed answers.
Gabriel Donadel retweeted
Thinking about rewriting that entire native app in React Native? Maybe... don’t. 👀📱
At #ChainReact2026, @donadeldev from @expo showed how Expo Brownfield can bring React Native into an existing native app without starting over.
To put it to the test, Expo took things a little further: 100+ open source apps, a purpose-built AI skill, and a mission to see just how far they could automate the integration. 🤖
The result? Plenty of surprises, product fixes, skill updates, and a much more robust way to bring Expo into existing apps.
See how they did it and why incremental React Native adoption might beat a full rewrite below! 👇
youtube.com/watch?v=Yk5KjVx6…
#ChainReact #ReactNative #Expo #MobileDev #AI #AppDevelopment
Gabriel Donadel retweeted
I really enjoyed @donadeldev's talk on adding Expo brownfield across 100s of open source native apps. That's such a clever way of testing your product. This screen where he scaled the process with @expo's Tuft was so impressive. Great job!
Gabriel Donadel retweeted
Oh not much just @donadeldev casually adding @expo brownfield to a 100 apps in a day to battle test the expo brownfield integration @ChainReactConf 👏
See the code: github.com/expo/expo-brownfi…
Get started with Expo brownfield: docs.expo.dev/versions/lates…
Such a great team! expo.dev/careers
A big group of us gathered in Hood River, Oregon this week to plan the roadmap, dogfood Expo, and cold plunge.
Taking all this momentum to @ChainReactConf now. Let us know if you'll be in Portland and would like to hang out.
🔥 Been playing with this, and it has a lot of potential.
Got the Expo Orbit CLI partially running on it with a few patches.
It would be a huge win for Orbit, given that we ship react-native-macos + a pkg'd Node binary for the internal CLI.
Will send some PRs.
Announcing Hermes-node
Hermes can now run as a standalone CLI with Node.js-compatible APIs - no C++ embedding required.
Technically, hermes-node is a Node.js API compatibility layer for Hermes. It ports Node's native bindings (fs, net, http, child_process, etc.) to Node-API and reuses Node's original lib/*.js files, allowing standard Node.js programs to run on Hermes instead of V8. It vendors libuv, c-ares, llhttp, Ada, simdutf, etc to provide the same networking and I/O stack as Node, and runs as a standalone CLI binary.
In this demo:
- REPL with tab completion
- TypeScript HTTP server using http, fs, and path
- Type annotations stripped natively by the parser — no transpiler, not even a built-in one.
This is still a work in progress, though surprisingly functional. More Node modules coming, source will be published soon.
Expo Orbit v2.8 is out 🪐
And now you can easily install iOS apps from Windows and Linux, pair Android devices via Wi-fi and much more
Check the full changelog ->
github.com/expo/orbit/releas…
Gabriel Donadel retweeted
If you're a react-native contributor, please read the following:
Your personal fork of react-native might be locked and could prevent you from contributing further
Gabriel Donadel retweeted
Two years of wanting to do this rewrite, two months of doing it. The Objective-C++ layer was a ceiling on what was possible in Expo Modules. That ceiling is gone now, and this rewrite is the platform for what we're building next.
More on top of this is coming 👀🚀
Gabriel Donadel retweeted
Expo SDK 56 is out 🙌
◆ Expo UI is stable on iOS and Android
◆ iOS builds 16% faster, plus another 20% on EAS from precompiled community libs
◆ Android cold starts 40% faster
◆ Expo Router decoupled from React Navigation
◆ Inline native modules: write Swift and Kotlin right next to your TypeScript
◆ Hermes v1 by default
◆ Bytecode diffing on by default (~58% smaller OTA updates)
◆ iOS Widgets stable
◆ React Native 0.85 + React 19.2
It's been two months since SDK 55, and we packed in everything we could fit. Your iOS build times are going to thank you. Full changelog ↓
Gabriel Donadel retweeted
We just cut the SDK 56 beta 😅
◆ 50%+ faster iOS builds (precompiled XCFrameworks) ◆ 40% faster cold starts on Android
◆ Expo UI is stable
◆ iOS widgets are stable
◆ expo-router rebuilt from scratch
◆ Inline native modules
◆ Brownfield multi-app support
The obvious themes are speed and stability. But there are a lot of other interesting changes (like Expo Router decoupling itself form React Navigation). Get all the nuance and detail in the changelog below ↓
Gabriel Donadel retweeted
🙌 Expo is the best it's ever been, and it's about to get a lot better.
We raised a Series B so we can go faster on the things that matter to you: faster builds, smoother native integrations, and the services to make end-to-end app development a delightful experience.
There is a lot of work to do. This round led by @Georgian_io puts us in position to go do it!
New version coming soon! expo.dev/orbit
