With 600 commits and 992 files changed, React Native 0.57 was released yesterday. In this release, major improvements are done in the accessibility APIs, and WKWebView-backed implementation is added just as they announced in August, along with several tooling updates.
What is new in React Native 0.57?
New features
- Accessibility APIs, used for making apps accessible to people with disabilities, now support accessibility hints, inverted colors, and easier usage of defining the element’s role and states.
- On iOS, WebView can now use WKWebView internally by passing useWebKit={true}.
- Loosen platform check to improve support for out-of-tree platforms.
- An implementation of YogaNodeProperties is added, which accesses style and layout properties using a ByteBuffer rather than JNI calls.
- FlatList and SectionList are now added to Animated exports.
Changes
- Android tooling has been updated to match newer configuration requirements (SDK 27, gradle 4.4, and support library 27)
- unbundle is renamed to ram-bundle (a breaking change for OSS)
- Minimum Node version is changed from 8 to 8.3
- Flow is upgraded to v0.76.0
- ESLint is upgraded to 5.1.0
- Babel is upgraded to v7.0.0
- The “loading from pre-bundled file” notification won’t show up anymore when not on dev mode
- StyleSheet.compose is refined so that subtypes of DangerouslyImpreciseStyleProp can flow through the function call without losing their type
- The use of new Metro configuration is supported in the public react-native CLI
- react-native-dom is whitelisted in haste/cli config defaults
Bug fixes
- debugger-ui path of react-native CLI was wrong earlier, which is now fixed.
- Extreme slowness of <TextInput> is fixed
- Placeholder of TextInput not completely visible on Android is fixed
- Horizontal <ScrollView> overflow issue is fixed
- Added support for connecting to the Packager when running the iOS app on device when using custom Debug configuration
- Fix crash in RCTImagePicker on iOS
Removed features
- ScrollView.propTypes is removed. It is recommended to use flow or typescript for verifying correct prop usage instead. (Breaking change)
- ReactInstancePackage is now deprecated. It is recommended to use @link ReactPackage or @link LazyReactPackage.
To know more about the improvements in React Native 0.57 release, head over to their GitHub repository.
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