React Native: Legacy Architecture Cleanup and Event System Improvements

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Good morning, this is your React Native briefing for June 6th, 2026.

The core theme this week is legacy architecture cleanup as React Native moves toward the new architecture. The team is systematically removing old systems while ensuring compatibility during the transition.

The biggest change is the React upgrade from version 19.2.3 to 19.2.7 in pull request 57089, touching multiple renderer areas and linking to over 200 issues. This upgrade brings stability improvements and keeps React Native current with the latest React features.

Legacy component removal is accelerating. Pull request 57073 gates shared C++ and Android legacy view manager interop behind the "remove legacy component interop" flag, while PR 57094 adds missing guards to iOS legacy view manager descriptors. The timing native module is now deprecated on both platforms, as seen in commit af08e67, signaling its removal in future releases. TurboModule enablement checks are also deprecated since they now always return true.

Event system improvements focus on the new EventTarget interface. Pull request 57088 adds granular control over the public EventTarget API through the "enable imperative events" flag, allowing the team to roll out event dispatching changes without immediately exposing new public methods like "add event listener" and "remove event listener."

Performance tooling received platform-specific fixes. Pull requests 57091 and 57095 resolve Perfetto tracing integration issues on Apple platforms, where timestamp calculations were incorrect due to different clock sources between the high-resolution timestamp API and Perfetto's native events.

Looking ahead, expect continued legacy architecture removal and more granular feature flags as the team maintains compatibility while modernizing the codebase. The EventTarget migration and React 19 integration should improve event handling reliability.

That's your React Native update for today.