React Native: Release 0.88 Ships With Stability Fixes
React Native is cutting the 0.88.0 release candidate with a Metro and Hermes version bump, alongside quiet but important correctness fixes to the Babel preset and Android text input handling, while backend teams continue locking down the C++ stable API surface.
Duration: PT2M44S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from React Native.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: React Native
- Published: 2026-09-14T13:04:07Z
- Audio duration: PT2M44S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good day, and welcome to React Native, your developer briefing for September 14th, 2026.
The headline today: React Native 0.88 is on its way out the door, and the surrounding activity shows a project tightening correctness at the edges while it does.
Start with the release itself. Rob Hogan opened PR 58503 for 0.88.0-rc.0, paired with PRs 58504 and 58506 bumping the minimum Metro version to 0.87.1, and PRs 58501 and 58502 bumping Hermes. The Metro bump isn't cosmetic - release notes cite Platform inlining corrections, better TypeScript types, and a dependency…
Second theme: correctness fixes that quietly prevent silent bugs. Commit f3fb550 fixes a real footgun in the Babel preset's handling of Platform.select - previously, discarded platform branches could still run their side effects during production builds, meaning code you thought was iOS-only might secretly execute…
Third theme: infrastructure hardening on the native side. Two commits from Jakub Piasecki - 9038350 and b2ddd06 - extend the C++ stable API guard system to the runtime executor and native module core targets. This is internal plumbing: apps opting into strict API mode will now get clear build errors if they reach…
Also…
Nearby episodes from React Native
- Weekly Recap - Text Rendering Fixes and the Stable API Push
- Fixing the Fine Print
- Cleaning Up Old Assumptions
- Text Rendering Fixes and a Repo-Wide Formatting Overhaul
- Locking Down the C++ API and Squashing Babel Bugs
- Locking Down the C++ API Surface, Stabilizing 0.88
- Locking Down the C++ API Surface
- Battery Drain Fixes and the Great Header Lockdown