React Native: Weekly Recap - Infrastructure & Code Quality
React Native focused on infrastructure improvements this week with 30 commits addressing deprecated API removal, feature flag cleanup, and build system enhancements. Notable changes include removing legacy Android components and optimizing event dispatch performance.
Duration: PT2M35S
Transcript
This is your React Native Weekly Recap for May 10th through 17th, 2026.
Zero PRs merged, 30 additional commits this week.
**Infrastructure & Cleanup**
The team made significant progress removing deprecated Android APIs. Mathieu Acthernoene removed the deprecated getWindowDisplayMetrics API from DisplayMetricsHolder, cleaning up methods marked for removal since version 0.87. Peter Abbondanzo removed the fixFindShadowNodeByTagRaceCondition feature flag after its successful rollout, making the race condition fix permanent across iOS and Android.
Nicola Corti continued the Kotlin migration effort, converting YogaNodeJNIBase from Java to Kotlin - the last hand-written Java source file in the Yoga core library. He also removed the legacy UIImplementation class, which had been reduced to non-functional stubs following the legacy architecture removal.
**Build & Tooling**
Christian Falch fixed a significant issue with Podfile.lock reproducibility where React XCFrameworks generated different checksums across different machines or paths. The fix replaces absolute file paths with stable Maven URLs, ensuring consistent builds across environments.
The team bumped Kotlin API version from 1.9 to 2.0 across all gradle-plugin build files to address deprecation warnings and build failures with newer Kotlin versions.
**Performance & Developer Experience**
Rubén Norte implemented parent lookup caching during event dispatch, delivering substantial performance improvements. The optimization reduces redundant JSI calls by caching parent relationships during the W3C event pipeline, showing 39% faster event dispatch in stable tree scenarios.
Alex Hunt improved TypeScript generation by pruning non-overlapping keys from Omit helpers, reducing API snapshot noise and improving type declaration readability.
**Package Updates**
Ivor Zhou updated hermes-parser and related packages to version 0.36.1 across the codebase. Rob Hogan added experimental support for preserving block scoping in the Babel preset to test native let/const support in Static Hermes.
Next week should bring continued focus on performance optimizations and the ongoing Kotlin migration efforts.
That's your React Native update. We'll be back next week with more developments from the React Native team.