React Native: Legacy Bridge Demolition and Faster iOS Strings
More than a dozen changes remove dead legacy bridge code that no longer runs, while a parallel push eliminates UTF-8 round-trips for strings moving between iOS native modules and JavaScript. A cluster of Text and TextInput fixes rounds out the week.
Duration: PT2M42S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from React Native.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: React Native
- Published: 2026-10-24T13:04:22Z
- Audio duration: PT2M42S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hello, it's Friday, October 24th, 2026, and this is your React Native briefing.
The lead pattern is cleanup at scale: the old bridge is gone in practice, and the codebase is finally catching up, alongside much faster string handling on iOS.
First, demolition of the legacy bridge. Commit 6a0f908 deletes nine per-module category implementations that never execute because the bridge is never instantiated, and follow-ups like PR 59426 and PR 59434 remove the gutted module-data class and deprecated initializers. Related PRs, including 59437, 59438, and…
Second, a faster path for strings. Commit 4fac9c8 reworks how strings returned from native modules to JavaScript convert on iOS, passing ASCII directly and other text as UTF-16 to avoid double conversion through UTF-8. PR 59422 covers the opposite direction, JavaScript to native, and PR 59449 extends the same idea…
Third, text reliability. PR 59407 fixes duplicated dictation in controlled single-line inputs on iOS 16 and later, PR 59447 restores content size change events when layout doesn't change, and backports in PRs 59432 and 59445 restore Japanese IME underlines. On Android, commit 5e13324 stops flattening views with live…
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