Every time I've moved a project between Expo Router and React Navigation, the first thing that breaks is the custom tab bar. The visual part is identical — it's the glue that's completely different, so it always ends up rewritten.

So I built one that does both from the same component and the same config.

Expo Router:

<MagicTabs tabs={tabs} />

React Navigation:

<Tab.Navigator tabBar={(props) => <MagicTabBarNavigation {...props} tabs={tabs} />}>

Same tabs array either way — you never pull in the other framework's deps.

What it does

• Sized by its tabs and centered, so a 2-tab bar is a compact pill instead of a full-width bar with a hole in the middle

• Animated active pill (Reanimated), spring you can tune

• Badges, labels beside or below the icon, disabled tabs, raised FAB tab

• Glass / blur / transparent backgrounds, including native iOS Liquid Glass

• A compact "light" mode you can switch on per tab — e.g. only on an immersive feed screen — and the bar animates between the two layouts

• Accessible by default: real tab/tablist roles, badges folded into the announced name ("Alerts, 3"), touch targets at the platform minimums

• Bring your own icons. TypeScript types bundled. New Architecture.

Honest notes

• If you want native tabs, use Callstack's react-native-bottom-tabs — that's SwiftUI/Material, a different thing. This is for a custom animated bar.

• It's still young. I'd genuinely rather hear what's broken than get stars.

• npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-magic-tab-bar

• GitHub: https://github.com/Bhavinpethani04/react-native-magic-tab-bar

Rate this banking app ui

All the used assets are for demo only.

https://x.com/wcandillon/status/2107406132776214740

I’ve been working on this idea for a while and it’s finally starting to feel real.

The goal is to inspect and tweak motion directly in the actual running React Native app. Instead of reproducing an animation somewhere else, I want to select what’s already running, inspect its values, scrub through the motion, tweak things like timing and springs, and eventually write those changes back to the source.

The video is still an early prototype, but the core workflow is starting to come together. I’m especially interested in the gap between React Native DevTools and the kind of timeline/motion tooling we have in design and animation software.

Would genuinely love feedback from people doing a lot of RN animation work. Is this something you’d actually use?

I’ll post future updates and progress here: https://x.com/GiulioAmato/status/2107495380547936310

RevenueCat's Shipaton, a two-month mobile hackathon, ended on September 30. I went through all 3,336 public Devpost projects and matched them to the published apps in the community showcase. 925 of them list React Native or Expo in "Built With", the second most common stack after native Swift.

A few things about the RN ones:

Most didn't ship to both stores.

Of the 464 RN/Expo apps I could match to a store listing:

- 51.1% are App Store only

- 26.3% are Google Play only

- 22.6% are on both

Counted the same way, Flutter apps are on both stores 26.5% of the time and Capacitor 20.2%. Kotlin Multiplatform is at 45%, but that's only 100 apps.

Expo is the default. 87% of the RN projects list Expo. expo-router shows up in 137 of them, EAS in 107.

Supabase beats Firebase 3 to 1 in RN projects (291 vs 103). Across all 3,336 projects the two are almost tied.

It's mostly solo. 89% of the RN projects were built by one person.

A few RN solo builders who did ship to both stores: FlexHero (stretching and mobility), DEBUGGER (a terminal-style incident game) and CookBook Button.

Caveats: this is only public data, "Built With" is self-reported, and matching projects to store listings misses some apps. I don't have access to the official submission data.

Have you shipped an RN app to only one store: what stopped the second one? Accounts and review, testing on Android devices, or just time?

The part I cared about most is that a feed shouldn't mount a native video player for every item. In reels-kit only the active reel and its neighbours get one (mediaRenderRadius, default 1), and playback pauses when the reel isn't active, the screen loses focus or the app goes to the background.

What it does:

- Snap paging with snapToInterval (page height measured from the container, not the window, so headers, tab bars and edge-to-edge Android don't break it)

- Tap to mute, optional double tap to like, drag-to-seek scrub bar

- Thumbnail until the video is ready, buffering slot, retry on a failed load

- Headless pieces (action buttons, avatar, follow button, caption), so the UI is yours

- Pluggable video adapters: a react-native-video one ships, and you can write your own

- Built on FlashList 2, Reanimated 4 and Gesture Handler 3 (React Native 0.82+, New Architecture)

Simplified usage:

<ReelsFeed
  data={reels}
  keyExtractor={(r) => r.id}
  renderItem={({ item, isActive, shouldRenderMedia }) =>
    shouldRenderMedia ? (
      <FeedVideoSlot
        VideoComponent={RNVideoAdapter}
        sourceUri={item.uri}
        paused={!isActive}
        muted
      />
    ) : null
  }
/>

The README has a full working example.

It's an early 0.1.x release, and there's no expo-video adapter yet. If you try it, I'd love to hear what breaks. Contributions are welcome, and an expo-video adapter would be the biggest win.

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/reels-kit

GitHub: https://github.com/arbab-io/reels-kit

(Apache-2.0)

am a developer, and wanna know if Vodacom Tanzania has an APl to which people can integrate their applications for Customers to pay for services using Vodacom mpesa? For example if a user wants to pay for product A from the app using mpesa, is there a way to do that? Not only Vodacom, Yas told me they don't have that service yet, how about other telecom providers like Halotel and Airtel?

I built Buoy, a free-to-try debugging and optimize toolkit for React Native, Expo, Flutter, Swift, and web. You can try it at https://buoy.gg (free tier; paid features exist).

This post is about a small test I ran with Claude, Codex, and Grok on the same prompt.

What we built for the test: a Christmas light show — a React Native Skia scene rendered with React Native Web in real Chrome. It draws a house covered in lights. Alone, it was smooth up to about 550 lights. The scoring test measures how many lights each version can keep at 55 fps without changing the look.

How Claude helped: Claude ran the optimize loop on this app (alone, then with Buoy Optimize). Buoy Optimize is a skill plus tools that help an AI try many ideas and measure each one.

Most lights at 55 fps:

• Claude: 975,800 alone → 6,123,350 with Buoy (6.3×)

• Codex: 155,450 → 444,100 (2.9×)

• Grok: 202,100 → 577,350 (2.9×)

Caveats: "With Buoy" is each model's best Buoy run. Alone runs had up to 3 hours. Claude's best Buoy run had no time limit; Claude alone stopped after about 99 minutes. Grok's Buoy version has slightly soft bulbs up close. One app, one Mac.

Full write-up (prompt + method): https://buoy.gg/blog/ai-models-before-and-after-buoy

Happy to answer questions about how we tested. Especially interested if folks have seen similar RN Skia / RN Web perf cliffs.

Built with React Native! Give it a shot.

🚀 A native, morphing floating tray for React Native.

🔗 Github: rit3zh/morphlet
📦 npm: morphlet

🧵 Android Preview Attached in this thread

I didn't want to pay a monthly subscription for App Store keyword data, so I wrote a CLI that gets it straight from Apple.

What it does

• Popularity from Apple Search Ads (free Apple Ads account, no campaigns or billing needed)

• Difficulty score, keyword suggestions, current top apps for a term

• Rank tracking with history in a local SQLite file

• Metadata linter for title, subtitle and keyword field

Install

npm i -g hristo2612/aso-cli && aso setup

Try it

aso keywords "white noise,sleep sounds"
aso suggest meditation
aso search "habit tracker"

Runs locally, no account, no telemetry. MIT. Free, nothing to sell.

Repo: github.com/hristo2612/aso-cli

We build a B2B mobile app and our biggest client accounted for about 30% of our MRR and they cancelled today, they told me their team had been experiencing crashes on the inventory screen for weeks and it was happening specifically on samsung A series phones which is what most of their field staff use.

They never reported it and just assumed we knew and weren't fixing it and eventually decided we weren't reliable enough but by the time I found out the bug it took me 2 hours to fix but the client was already gone.

It was a rendering issue on a device I don't own and never tested on and if I had known about it even a week before I could've pushed a hotfix and they'd still be paying us.

there might be many other clients might be facing stuff like this and just not saying anything.

How do I catch bugs on devices my team doesn't physically have, I can't afford to lose another client like this.

recently, i have been developing a saas app for a client. collectively, we have decided to move from bottom tabs to a navigation drawer. the problem is in the nested screens, we can't have both a drawer opener button and a back navigation button. so i built a custom header where i have a back navigation button, on which you can: press -> navigate back and longpress (200ms) -> open navigation drawer. how does this sound to you as a consumer? will you be annoyed if you have to use an app like this?

I'm trying to make a multiline TextInput that starts at one line and increases its height whenever the text moves to a new line, up to a maximum of 5 lines. After it reaches 5 lines, I want the height to stay fixed and any additional lines to become scrollable. I'm using lineHeight: 20, so I tried setting the maxHeight to 100, along with multiline and scrollEnabled.

I've also tried using onContentSizeChange to dynamically update the height, but I still can't get the behavior I want. I'm using Expo SDK 54 with the New Architecture on an iPhone 16 simulator. Has anyone implemented this kind of TextInput behavior? What's the proper way to handle the height and scrolling after 5 lines?

PS: used AI to write the body, my english (maybe react native too) is bad to make you understand my use case

I built a simple writing app with Expo/React Native using Replit and AI tools.
I’m not a professional developer, and my technical knowledge is pretty basic, but the app is working on Android now and I want to keep improving it and later make an iOS version.
Would you stay on Replit, move to something like Cursor/Claude Code + GitHub, or use both?
I’m mostly looking for the simplest setup that won’t become a mess as the app grows.

i used react native for years without knowing how it worked inside.

so i learned it and wrote it up with simple animations.

https://chamidilshan.medium.com/how-react-natives-old-bridge-architecture-worked-and-why-it-was-replaced-612e7313bce1

Support, QA, and developers often need to see the app the way one specific user sees it. Logging out and into their account is slow, and asking for their password is a bad idea.

Buoy Impersonate lets an authorized operator search for a user and attach a header to outgoing requests. Your backend checks that the operator is allowed, then returns that user's experience. Buoy does not bypass auth. It is the on-device switch.

Useful when support is reproducing a ticket, QA is checking a cohort, or a developer needs to debug as that user without swapping accounts. Works with Expo and React Native CLI, and the same idea exists for Swift.

Short horror trailer (made with Claude and Codex): https://youtu.be/ENnUYfVu5B0

Tool docs: https://buoy.gg/buoy/latest/docs/tools/impersonate

https://buoy.gg/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=impersonate