React Conf 2025 Recap
Oct 16, 2025 by Matt Carroll.
Last week we hosted React Conf 2025, a two-day conference in Henderson, Nevada where 700+ attendees gathered in-person to discuss the latest in UI engineering and celebrate 10 years of React Native.
At React Conf 2025, day 1 we announced new canary features like <ViewTransition /> and Fragment Refs, 19.2 features like <Activity />, useEffectEvent, Performance Tracks, and Partial Pre-Rendering. We also announced React Compiler v1.0 and the React Foundation. On day 2 we announced the Async React Working Group, React Native 0.82 will be new architecture only, experimental Hermes V1 support, and new DOM Node APIs.
The entire day 1 and day 2 streams are available online and you can view photos from the event here. In this post, we’ll summarize the talks and announcements from the event.
Day 1
Watch the full day 1 stream here.
React Conf emcee Michael Chan kicked off day 1 and Seth Webster, the head of React, introduced the conference. To start the keynote, Joe Savona shared the updates from the team and community since the last React Conf including React 19, over 6B lifetime React downloads, and owner stacks.
Mofei Zhang and Jack Pope announced new React 19.2 and Canary channel features including:
- <ViewTransition /> Canary only — a new component for native browser animations deeply integrated with React’s concurrent rendering. See Chance Strickland’s talk View Transitions and Activity for more on how to build smooth, native-feeling animations.
- <Activity /> component to manage visibility. See Chance Strickland’s talk View Transitions and Activity for more on how to efficiently manage hidden content.
- Performance Tracks — a new profiling tool in DevTools. For a deep dive on Performance Tracks see Ruslan Lesiutin’s talk Profiling with React Performance tracks.
- Fragment Refs Canary only — a new composition pattern for platform APIs without extra wrappers.
- useEffectEvent to extract non-reactive logic from your Effects.
- Partial Pre-Rendering to pre-render part of an app ahead of time, and resume rendering it later.
Lauren Tan announced that React Compiler v1.0 is now available and recommends new apps use React Compiler and all apps use the React Compiler-powered ESLint plugin. In In case you missed the memo, Cody Olsen from Sanity shared how adopting React Compiler improved performance by 20-30% and caught subtle bugs through its advanced static analysis and ESLint rules. Seth Webster announced the formation of the React Foundation.
The rest of the talks from day 1 include:
- Exploring React Performance by Joe Savona details the research the React team has been working on to improve React performance and the importance of data modeling
- Modern Emails using React by Zeno Rocha (Resend)
- Building an MCP Server by James Swinton (AG Grid)
- Why React Native Apps Make All the Money by Perttu Lähteenlahti (RevenueCat)
- The invisible craft of great UX by Michał Dudak (MUI)
- React and AI panel with Christopher Chedeau, Kent C. Dodds, Shawn Wang, Lee Robinson, and Theo Browne
- React Team Q&A hosted by Shruti Kapoor, featuring Mofei Zhang, Joe Savona, Ruslan Lesiutin, Lauren Tan, Ricky Hanlon, Jack Pope, and Seth Webster.
Watch day 1 here:
Day 2
Watch the full day 2 stream here.
Jorge Cohen & Nicola Corti kicked off day 2 highlighting React Native’s incredible growth with 4M weekly downloads (100% growth YoY), and some notable app migrations from Shopify, Zalando, and HelloFresh, award winning apps like RISE, RUNNA, and Partyful, and AI apps from Mistral, Replit, and v0.
Riccardo Cipolleschi announced React Native 0.82 will be New Architecture only, and experimental Hermes V1 support. Ruben Norte and Alex Hunt finished out the keynote by announcing new web-aligned DOM & Performance APIs, a new network panel & desktop app.
Ricky Hanlon closed the conference with the continuation of his Async React talk (part 1, part 2), demonstrating how transitions, use-optimistic, suspense, and view transitions work together. He announced the Async React Working Group to help the community adopt these patterns in routers, data libraries, and design components.
Community & React team talks
- React Native, Amplified by Giovanni Laquidara and Eric Faisl talked about how to build with React for Vega OS—a new operating system that powers Amazon’s new devices.
- React Everywhere: Bringing React Into Native Apps by Mike Grabowski showed how to add React Native to existing iOS/Android apps with minimal changes
- Reimagining Lists in React Native by Luna Wei introduced Virtual View, a new primitives for lists that manages visibility with mode-based rendering (hidden/pre-render/visible)
- React Strict DOM by Nicolas Gallagher talked about Meta’s approach to using web code on native
React Framework & Build tool talks
The second half of day 2 had a series of talks from a variety of React frameworks and build tools capped off with a Q&A panel hosted by Jack Herrington with representatives from Parcel (Devon Govett), Next.js (Josh Story), Expo (Evan Bacon), React Router (Kent C. Dodds), RedwoodSDK (Peter Pistorius), Rock (Michał Pierzchała) and TanStack (Tanner Linsley).
- How Parcel Bundles React Server Components by Devon Govett
- Designing Page Transitions by Delba de Oliveira
- Build Fast, Deploy Faster — Expo in 2025 by Evan Bacon
- The React Router take on RSC by Kent C. Dodds
- RedwoodSDK: Web Standards Meet Full-Stack React by Peter Pistorius and Aurora Scharff
- TanStack Start by Tanner Linsley
Watch day 2 here: