We are excited to release a new version of React Native, 0.69.0. This version comes with several improvements for the New Architecture of React Native and new features: React 18 support & bundled Hermes.

Sections

• React 18
• Bundled Hermes
• Highlights of 0.69

1. React 18

We are delighted to share with you that React Native 0.69 is the first release to support React 18. React 18 has brought lots of improvements, like new hooks such as useId. Additionally, React 18 includes new concurrency features such as useTransitionor full Suspense support.

2. Bundled Hermes

Hermes and React Native were released separately. That led to confusion on which version of Hermes is compatible with which version of React Native. To remedy this issue, starting with React Native 0.69 we will be shipping a compatible version of Hermes alongside React Native. Making this change will make using Hermes in React Native much more stable.

Note: that users on the New Architecture on Android will need to build Hermes from source. For building Hermes from source, Windows users will need to additionally follow these steps.

Highlights of 0.69

As mentioned above, the most important improvements in this release are centered around React 18 support and bundled Hermes. However, there have been other notable changes, including:

• Deprecating support for iOS/tvOS SDK 11.0, version 12.4+ is now required
• Better support for M1 users developing for Android
• Addition of the new .xcode.env configuration file for more deterministically sourcing the node executable
• React Native now uses the latest status bar API from Android 11
• Support for C++17
• New hotkeysEnabledoption in the iOS debug menu

Breaking changes

There have also been a few breaking changes:

• React Native CLI has been bumped to a new major version of 8.0

 1. link and unlink commands have been removed in the favour of autolinking
 2. Deprecated initCompat has been removed, use init command instead
 3. Removed deprecated run-android properties
 4. Removed install and uninstall commands
 5. Removed assets and hooks from react-native.config.js – you'll need to remove these properties from your config
 6. podspecPath was removed from the iOS dependency config
 7. Removed --project-path option from a run-ios
 8. Changed iOS source directory detection from looking for an Xcode project to looking for a Podfile

• Support for console.disableYellowBox has been dropped
• Already deprecated prop types have been removed (cdfddb4dad, 3e229f27bc, 10199b1581)
• removeListener, deprecated since RN 0.65, was removed from Appearance
• If you were using SegmentedComponentIOS, you will now need to replace it with the third-party library, for example segmented-control (235f168574)

Thanks so much for being part of the DEV community! 🙌