React Native: Weekly Recap - Platform Stability and Feature Flag Cleanup

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Good morning. This is your React Native weekly recap for May 17th through 24th, 2026.

Zero pull requests were merged this week, with 30 additional commits landing directly to the main branch.

Starting with critical fixes, the team addressed a long-standing Android ScrollView crash that could occur during multi-touch interactions. The IllegalArgumentException in onTouchEvent has been resolved across ReactScrollView, ReactHorizontalScrollView, and ReactNestedScrollView components. This mirrors existing protections already in place for onInterceptTouchEvent and should eliminate crashes reported on devices running Android 15.

iOS developers will benefit from a fix to percentage-based border radius calculations. The issue occurred when the border radius checking logic failed to account for circular corners, causing rendering problems in certain layout scenarios.

Several feature flags reached the end of their experimental phase this week. The useTurboModules flag has been permanently removed, as TurboModules are now always enabled. The enableEagerMainQueueModulesOnIOS flag is also gone, making eager main-queue module setup the default behavior. Additionally, the useUnorderedMapInDifferentiator experiment concluded and has been shipped as the standard implementation.

Infrastructure improvements include a fix for CocoaPods installations in paths containing Unicode characters. This addresses build failures that could occur when React Native projects were located in directories with non-ASCII characters or spaces.

The core-cli-utils package has been moved from the public packages directory to private, repositioning it as a reference implementation rather than a published npm package. This change affects internal tooling but has no impact on external consumers.

Performance optimizations were implemented in the codebase through systematic migration from try-finally patterns to the more concise Systrace.trace helper method. Flow type annotations also received updates to use modern variance syntax across multiple files.

Development tools saw improvements with better error handling and more consistent API surface area. The team continues working on code modernization efforts, including readonly type annotations and API consolidation.

Next week, expect continued focus on stability improvements and the ongoing effort to streamline React Native's internal architecture. The team appears to be preparing for upcoming releases by consolidating experimental features and addressing platform-specific edge cases.

That's your React Native weekly recap. Stay tuned for next week's development updates.