On Wednesday, November 4, the first release candidate of React Native 0.89 went up, and the most interesting part of its changelog is a list of things that no longer exist. The bridgelessEnabled switches are gone on both platforms, the three-argument load() overload on Android is gone, the legacy RCTNativeAnimatedModule on iOS is gone. Thirteen months after 0.82 made the New Architecture the only architecture, the team is now deleting the knobs that pretended otherwise. The same week Next.js shipped seven security fixes, most of them in its cache, and Stream rebuilt its React Native chat SDK from the state layer up. Quiet on react.dev for an eighth week. Not quiet anywhere else.
Here is what mattered in React and React Native for November 2 to November 8, 2026.
Releases
React Native 0.89.0-rc.0: the cleanup release
0.89.0-rc.0 is a breaking minor, so read it before the stable lands. The changes most teams will hit: @react-native/community-cli-plugin is no longer auto-detected and must be in your devDependencies, Community CLI 21.x is required, @react-native/assets-registry is removed in favour of AssetRegistry from react-native, and unstable_batchedUpdates is deprecated. Library authors who ship pre-generated JNI codegen have to regenerate it, because codegen CMake now builds with -Werror, and Swift modules that override constantsToExport with an implicitly unwrapped return type stop compiling now that RCTBridgeModule.h has nullability annotations. The additions are nice too: a useAppState() hook, structuredClone and DOMException as globals, lineBreak and wordBreak on Android Text, and an experimental onSafeAreaInsetsChange view prop. My take: if you skipped 0.88 because it had “no breaking changes” and nothing you needed, this is the one to plan for, and the native module audit is where the time goes. Our upgrade helper guide covers the routine.
Metro 0.88: resolver defaults change
Metro 0.88.0 now reads "exports" from the package root and applies "browser" redirections after it by default, and the runtime modules move to metro:runtime/... specifiers that are not file paths. If you have a custom resolver.resolveRequest, it must hand any metro: specifier it does not recognise to context.resolveRequest. Most apps will not notice. The ones with a clever monorepo resolver will notice on the first build.
react-native-screens 5.0.0-beta.1
The first 5.0 beta adds React Native 0.88 support, a contained modal on iOS that stays inside its provider (think one column of a split view), configurable transition presets for Stack v5 on Android, and Liquid Glass replacement for form sheets on iOS 26.1+. The breaking bit is tab icons on iOS: templateSource and xcasset types are gone and imageSource icons are tinted by default, so colourful tab icons need renderingMode: 'original'. Background in our react-native-screens explainer.
Stream Chat React Native v10
v10.0.0 moves to stream-chat@^10 and stops keeping its own copy of channel, message and thread state; components read from the client’s state stores and a channel-list paginator your app owns. There is a typed i18n layer and voice-agent visualizations on top. It is a big migration, with three separate guides. I like the direction (one source of truth for state is how chat UIs stop drifting), but budget a sprint, not an afternoon. If you are choosing rather than migrating, our chat library comparison is the starting point.
Smaller ones worth a minute
- Gesture Handler 3.5.0:
Begin,DeactivateandFinalizeevent types for v3 gestures, and cancelled pans onReanimatedSwipeablenow undo properly. - Keyboard Controller 1.23.0: a deliberately small minor with a
transparentprop onKeyboardExtenderand severalKeyboardChatScrollViewfixes, which matters if you build chat screens. - Skia 3.9.0: the Canvas
colorSpaceprop is back and GPU work now pauses while the app is in the background (3.9.1 and 3.9.2 followed). - Sentry React Native 8.34.0: experimental
enableJsHangTrackingon iOS reports a blocked JS thread as an error with a Hermes stack, which App Hang tracking never caught. Setup in our Sentry guide. - Unistyles 3.8.0: now requires React Native 0.85+ (Expo SDK 56+); the Metro integration no longer runs a Babel transform.
- Paper 5.15.4: fixes a
TextInputcrash on iOS with the New Architecture when nofontWeightis set. Your Jest snapshots will change. - Expo SDK 58 patches (
[email protected]) and four EAS CLI releases (27.5.0) that keep building out simulator sessions you can drive from scripts and agents.
React.js and the wider JavaScript week
Next.js November security release: 16.4.5 and 15.5.29 fix seven moderate advisories, four of them in 'use cache' and Cache Components (cross-tenant disclosure through unstable_cache, cache poisoning via placeholder route params, cross-user disclosure with binary arguments) plus an SVG bypass in image optimization and an HttpOnly cookie leak on Edge routes. Second Next.js security release in a month. Patch today, and if you run multi-tenant pages on the cache, read the advisories rather than the summary.
Rolldown 1.3.0 adds experimental import attributes and comes with a warning I appreciate: do not force it into Vite 8.3.6 with overrides, wait for a Vite release. Zustand 5.1.0 lets persist work with promise-like storage and makes rehydrate() awaitable, useful for React Native apps hydrating from async storage. Redux Toolkit 2.14.0 speeds up dispatch and RTK Query type checking ahead of the 3.0 roadmap. Vitest 5.1.0 adds --last-failed and --since-last-run, and Storybook 11 reached its first beta.
Worth reading
Read the full 0.89 RC changelog once, top to bottom. It is the clearest picture yet of what “New Architecture only” means in code: interop layers stay, but every flag that let you pretend you were on the old system is being removed. I have been through enough React Native upgrades to know that the release candidate is when to file the issue, not after the stable when your library maintainer is on holiday. If you maintain a native module, build it against rc.0 this week.
On this site this week: video playback in React Native on Wednesday, and how React Native actually works under the hood on Friday. If you shipped something I missed, tell me in the comments and it goes in next Monday.