React Native 0.60 releases with accessibility improvements, AndroidX support, and more

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Yesterday, the team behind React Native announced the release of React Native 0.60. This release brings accessibility improvements, a new app screen, AndroidX support, CocoaPods in iOS by default, and more.

Following are some of the updates introduced in React Native 0.60:

Accessibility improvements

This release ships with several improvements to accessibility APIs both on Android and iOS. As the new features directly use APIs provided by the underlying platform, they’ll easily integrate with native assistance technologies.

Here are some of the accessibility updates to React Native 0.60:

A number of missing roles have been added for various components.
There’s a new Accessibility States API for better web support in the future.
AccessibilityInfo.announceForAccessibility is now supported on Android.
Extended accessibility actions will now include callbacks that deal with accessibility around user-defined actions.
iOS accessibility flags and reduce motion are now supported on iOS.
A clickable prop and an onClick callback are added for invoking actions via keyboard navigation.

A new start screen

React Native 0.60 comes with a new app screen, which is more user-friendly. It shows useful instructions like editing App.js, links to the documentation, how you can start the debug menu, and also aligns with the upcoming website redesign.

CocoaPods are now part of React Native’s iOS project

React Native for iOS now comes with CocoaPods by default, which is an application level dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. Developers are recommended to open the iOS platform code using the ‘xcworkspace’ file from now on. Additionally, the Pod specifications for the internal packages have been updated to make them compatible with the Xcode projects, which will help with troubleshooting and debugging.

Lean Core removals

In order to bring the React Native repository to a manageable state, the team started the Lean Core project. As a part of this project, they have extracted WebView and NetInfo into separate repositories. With React Native 0.60, the team has finished migrating them out of the React Native repository. Geolocation has also been extracted based on the community feedback about the new App Store policy.

Autolinking for iOS and Android

React Native libraries often consist of platform-specific or native code. The autolinking mechanism enables your project to discover and use this code. With this release, the React Native CLI team has made major improvements to autolinking. Developers using React Native before version 0.60, are advised to unlink native dependencies from a previous install.

Support for AndroidX (Breaking change)

With this release, React Native has been migrated to AndroidX (Android Extension library). As this is a breaking change, developers need to migrate all their native code and dependencies as well. The React Native community has come up with a temporary solution for this called “jetifier”, an AndroidX transition tool in npm format, with a react-native compatible style.

Many users are excited about the release and considered it to be the biggest RN release.

Other developers shared some tips for migrating to AndroidX, which is an open source project that maps the original support library API packages into the androidx namespace. We can’t use both AndroidX and the old support library together, which means “you are either all in or not in at all.”

Here’s a piece of good advice shared by a developer on Reddit:

“Whilst you may be holding off on 0.60.0 until whatever dependency you need supports X you still need to make sure you have your dependency declarations pinned down good and proper, as dependencies around the react native world start switching over if you automatically grab a version with X when you are not ready your going to get fun errors when building, of course this should be a breaking change worthy of a major version number bump but you never know. Much safer to keep your versions pinned and have a googlePlayServicesVersion in your buildscript (and only use libraries that obey it).”

Considering this release has major breaking changes, others are also suggesting to wait for some time till 0.60.2 comes out. “After doing a few major updates, I would suggest waiting for this update to cool down. This has a lot of breaking changes, so I would wait for at least 0.60.2 to be sure that all the major requirements for third-party apps are fulfilled ( AndroidX changes),” a developer commented on Reddit.

Along with these exciting updates, the team and community have introduced a new tool named Upgrade Helper to make the upgrade process easier. To know more in detail check out the official announcement.