Hey notJust Developers,

The most exciting news of last week is that React Native 0.77 was released, and the Expo team added support for it! Let’s check out today’s highlights.

1. React Native 0.77 Stable Out 🔥
2. React Native Reanimated V4 Now In Beta 🚀
3. Native Bottom Tabs V0.8 Released 💯

React Native 0.77 Stable Out 🔥

After 8 pre-releases, the stable version of React Native 0.77 was finally released last week. This update includes over 1061 commits from 161 contributors! Here are the major highlights:

1. New CSS Features for better layouts, sizing, and blending
2. Support for Android 15 edge-to-edge enforcement
3. New Swift Template for iOS
4. Expo SDK 52 now supports 0.77 🚀

New CSS Feature: { display: contents }

By adding the display: contents style, you can now directly ignore an element (like a <View>) from the component tree (known as the DOM tree in React or Web). This means all the children (e.g., <Text> components) of that elementwill treat their grandparent as their direct parent. This can be useful when a wrapper (e.g., <View>) has no value (impact) in the final tree.

New CSS Feature: { mixBlendMode: multiply }

By using the mixBlendMode CSS property, you can blend the colors of multiple elements. For example, if you have a <View/> with a yellow color and another <View/> with a blue color, and you overlap them and apply mixBlendMode, the overlapping section of the two <View/> elements will appear as green. These blend effects help to create interactive artistic visual effects.

Support For Android 15 edge-to-edge Enforcement

When you build your app with targetSdk 35, you will need to use an edge-to-edge display. Edge-to-edge means your app will use the whole screen, including the status bar (where you see the time and battery) and the navigation bar. To handle this properly, the team recommended using the react-native-safe-area-context SDK, which will manage the edge-to-edge display for you.

New Swift Template for iOS

​Oskar Kwaśniewski worked on a PR that removed Objective-C from the template in September. The React Native team has finally merged it with the 0.77 release. So, starting from 0.77, you will see AppDelegate.swift instead of AppDelegate.mm.

Expo SDK 52 now supports 0.77 🚀

The Expo Team announced that Expo SDK 52 now supports both React Native 0.76 and 0.77. You can choose to use version 0.77 by following this guide.

NOTE: Keep an eye on notjust.dev/blog - we’ll soon publish a detailed blog post on the React Native 0.77 release! 🚀

React Native Reanimated V4 Now In Beta 🚀

Last week, the Software Mansion team released React Native Reanimated V4, which finally supports CSS Animations and Transitions. This version introduces a set of new APIs that let you write CSS-like code to create animations in React Native, similar to React (web) animations code. These new APIs offer native-like performance and work with the New Architecture, allowing you to animate almost everything you want. If you're familiar with CSS animations, you'll feel right at home. This new version is available in Beta 🚀.

Reanimated V4 Online Translator

The most interesting part is that the team has also created an online tool that translates CSS code into Reanimated 4 style code. Why not give this amazing tool a try today?

Native Bottom Tabs V0.8 Released 💯

Last week Oskar Kwaśniewski released React Native Bottom Tabs 0.8, which now supports Material You design. Let's dive in!

What is Material You?

​Material You, also known as Material 3 Dynamic Color, is an SDK created by Google in 2021. It automatically adjusts your app's colors based on the user's wallpaper or device settings.

Material You now in React Native Bottom Tabs 🚀

If you enable the material3-dynamic option in React-Native-Bottom-Tabs, your app’s bottom tab will match the user's chosen device color. For example, if a user picks yellow in their device settings, the app's bottom tab will also be yellow, making the app feel more personal. You can find a detailed guide on how to enable Material You in both Expo and React Native CLI-based apps here.

That’s it 🙌

​Evan Bacon from the Expo Team mentioned that 2025 is going to be a great year for styling in React Native. That means, more styling improvements are also coming in Expo too.

🔁 In case you missed it

Building an AI Social Listening App with BrightData You’ll learn how to collect brand mentions from search engines and social media, process the data efficiently, and extract valuable insights using AI. This guide will show you how to monitor your brand’s online presence at scale. Watch now

Announcing the WINNERS of notJust.Hack In this demo day we'll be announcing the winner projects built during notJust.Hack, our month-long online hackathon for mobile developers! We'll be going straight into the top submissions, where you'll hear from the winners, and we'll give you a sneak peek at what’s coming next! Watch now

🔥 Press worthy

1️⃣ Simply add analytics to your React Native app in under 1 minute with Vexo. Use the promo code “NotJustDev10” for a 10% discount!

2️⃣ The Expo API Routes (for creating server endpoints in Expo apps) documentation has been published.

3️⃣ React Native visionOS 0.77 is out, contains all the changes from React Native 0.77 🚀

4️⃣ Unistyles 3 has been added to the Create Expo Stack 💯

5️⃣ Marc announced Flows AI: A lightweight library to build AI agent (AI helper) workflows, on top of Vercel AI SDK.

6️⃣ Soon you will be able to replace BottomSheetFlatList by LegendList with just a single import from React Native Bottom Sheet 🚀
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The newsletter was written by Anis and edited by Vadim Savin.

Vadim Savin Helping you become a better developer together with the notJust.dev team

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