📨 #290: Suspense, Working Groups, Next.js, React Router, Storybook, Astryx | Media-queries, ViewTransition, Platform.Variant, Nitro, Screens, KeyboardController, Skia | TC39, Bun, Nub, npm, Native SDK

Hi everyone, Konrad and Szymon from Software Mansion here.

This week, the React team documented how it was reorganized around working groups. The docs got a new section on what actually activates a Suspense boundary. A few thoughtful posts weighed React against lighter alternatives like HTMX and SolidJS.

On the React Native side, two RFCs caught our eye, media queries in StyleSheet and ViewTransition support, plus a Nitro Modules rewrite of Rive that's up to 94x faster.

Also worth your time: the newest version of npm blocks install scripts by default!

Let's dive in!

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⚛️ React

• 💸 SVAR React Gantt — A modern React Gantt chart for project scheduling, from simple timelines to enterprise planning
• 👀 Meet the new React Team - Reorganized by Working Groups - The newly refreshed team page now reflects React Foundation governance: a Leadership Council with one representative per Working Group, and members contributing to Working Groups clearly identified with a badge.
• 📖 React Docs - What activates a Suspense boundary - New React docs section with live examples covering lazy loading, reading promises with use(), stylesheets/fonts/images loading, streaming SSR, deferred CPU work. Includes a side-by-side of reading a Promise with use vs fetching in an Effect. TIL React reveals suspended content at most once every 300ms.
• 🔐 Next.js Security Release and Our Next Patch Release - The Next.js team plans to publish security patches roughly once a month, with advance notice of timeline and severity, so teams can plan accordingly.
• 📣 Better Auth is joining Vercel - The framework-agnostic auth library, which already acquired NextAuth/Auth.js, is now under Vercel. They're pivoting toward an "Agent Auth Protocol" for agentic workflows.
• 📜 Cache Components in Next.js 16 - Flips the App Router to dynamic-by-default, letting you opt into caching with "use cache", cacheLife, and cacheTag primitives that replace legacy caching APIs to power Instant Navigations.
• 📜 React Compiler explained - Shows the Compiler's actual output and how it differs from hand-written memoization, plus how to enable it.
• 📜 useOptimistic Already Handles Rollback in Next.js 16 - It auto-reverts to base state on a failed transition, so the manual rollback in your catch block is often redundant.
• 📜 HTMX and Web Components Instead of React - Mentions the issue with React being the default frontend solution and when it is an overengineering.
• 📜 Async hydration in Preact - Deep dive into how Preact hydration compares to React. Preact v10 can already pause hydration at Suspense boundaries, and v11 will make this more reliable with Hydration 2.0.
• 📜 SolidJS 2.0: A React Developer's First Look - An overview of Solid's signals and their benefits: no dependency arrays, no stale closures, native async in the reactive graph.
• 📜 Exporting Next.js Server Traces with OpenTelemetry - Next.js already emits server-side traces. With little work you can ship them to any OTLP endpoint, any vendor.
• 💸 Formity – Build onboarding, checkout, surveys, lead generation, and more with programmable multi-step forms
• 📦 React Router 8.2 - adds a Web Streams default server entry for non-Node Framework mode apps, nub package manager support - Non-Node apps now default to renderToReadableStream; Node 22+ can opt in behind a flag.
• 📦 Storybook 10.5 - Agentic Review, one-click Claude/Codex plugins, storybook ai MCP command, Angular-Vite preview - Makes Storybook a first-class citizen for coding agents — the MCP passthrough exposes component metadata directly to AI tools.
• 📦 Astryx 0.1.3 - Meta design system, built with StyleX - Better tables, keyboard navigation, and accessibility
• 📦 React Email 6.7 - Enable custom export extensions via --extension
• 🎥 Jack Herrington Can’t Think of a Reason to Choose Next.js Anymore
• 🎥 Ankita Kulkarni - Next.js 16.3 Finally Fixed Slow Navigations
• 🎙️ Podrocket - Async React with Vercel's Aurora Scharff

Don't miss the next email!

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📱 React-Native

• 💸 PostHog - A guide to growth metrics for startups that don't fit in
• 💬 RFC - Media query support in StyleSheet - Borrows StyleX syntax: a style property can hold a default plus @media branches for orientation and color scheme. Styles resolve natively on the UI thread, so switching to dark mode no longer triggers React re-renders.
• 💬 RFC - ViewTransition support in React Native - Discussion to bring React's <ViewTransition> component to Fabric for shared, enter, and exit transitions, an alternative to Reanimated's layout and shared element animations.
• 💬 Proposal - React Native out-of-tree platform API - Doug Lowder, maintainer of react-native-tvos, proposed a new Platform.Variant API (mobile, desktop, tv, headset, web), so that react-native forks don’t have to override the Platform API.
• 🎨 Expo Demos - Gallery of 30 community-built UI demos - Covers WebGPU, shaders, Live Activities, and the new SDK 55 Stack API. Good reference material for advanced UI patterns in mobile apps.
• 📜 Rewriting Rive React Native with Nitro Modules: up to 94× Faster Multi-View Loads - Nitro’s HybridObjects turn a loaded .riv asset into a native object you preload once and share across views, instead of re-parsing per view - 94 times faster multi-view loads and 4.7 times less memory than the old TurboModules SDK.
• 📜 Building balanced mobile layouts: nesting tabs and drawers with Expo Router - Wrapping bottom tabs in a drawer is a common layout that's tricky to get right in file-based routing - the article focuses on theming and gesture handling that won't fight the tabs.
• 📜 Notification Actions in Expo: Let Users Respond Without Opening Your App - Let users respond to notifications without opening the app.
• 📜 Migrating to native stack navigation, with a surprise from iOS 26 - Switching to native stack made the app inherit Liquid Glass styling on iOS 26. The UIDesignRequiresCompatibility Info.plist key opts out, and watch out: native headers clip anything taller than 44pt.
• 📜 Expo - Moving away from @expo/vector-icons - The @expo/vector-icons wrapper package will be deprecated in favor of direct @react-native-vector-icons/* usage.
• 💸 Drizz - One test suite for Android and iOS. No platform-specific selectors, no XPaths. Plain English tests on real devices, powered by AI
• 📦 React Native Screens 4.26 - Stable Tabs API, faster iOS header updates, requires React Native 0.84+ - The native Tabs component is now stable. Experimental work on standalone FormSheet and Stack v5 toolbar menus continues.
• 📦 Keyboard Controller 1.22 - New KeyboardEffects component to customize the iOS keyboard background - You can disable translucency or apply brand colors.
• 📦 Sentry React Native 8.18 - Consume sentry-cocoa as a prebuilt xcframework on iOS. The prebuilt xcframework downloads from GitHub instead of building from source, which should speed up iOS builds.
• 📦 React Native Auth0 5.9 - Passwordless OTP for database connections
• 📦 Unistyles 3.3 - transformOrigin support for shadow tree updates, background image props on Android, react-navigation inactive behavior support
• 📦 React Native Webview 16.0 - Removes legacy architecture support
• 📦 React Native Toast Message 2.4 - Configurable enter/exit animations via animationConfig, onShow callback now receives ToastShowParams
• 📦 React Native Skia 2.8 - Paragraph.getPath() and extendedVisit(), Reanimated is now optional, lower WASM memory use on web
• 📦 React Native Bottom Tabs 1.4 - Icon rendering mode to preserve original icon colors, focused icon shown on hover with iOS Liquid Glass, tab testIDs exposed to Android E2E tools
• 📦React Native Boost 1.6 - Babel optimizing plugin - Add opt-in Image optimizer

🔀 Other

• 👀 TC39 - Agenda for the 115th meeting - July 20-23 - Next week, many proposals could advance, including Promise.allKeyed(), JSON.parseImmutable(), Error.code, Map.take(), Declarations in Conditionals, RegExp linear matching.
• 💬 pnpm RFC - Native Monorepo Versioning - Built-in release management coming to pnpm - a native changesets alternative with per-package prerelease lanes that changesets can't structurally express. Merged this week.
• 📜 Rewriting Bun in Rust - Jarred Sumner used ~64 parallel Claude instances with adversarial code review to port ~535k lines of Zig, landing v1.4.0 with fewer memory bugs and ~20% smaller binaries. A striking case study in AI-driven large-scale rewrites. It cost ~$165k in API spend vs. an estimated year of engineer time.
• 📜 Node’s phantom dependency problem and the path to a 5x faster package manager - The Nub team documents the challenges of using a global virtual store and node_module symlinks, already tried by pnpm and Bun. They found a way to make it reliable with a mix of symlinks and hardlinks, leading to warm installs ~5x faster than Bun. However Next.js / Turbopack and React Native / Metro present other challenges.
• 📜 Fetch Needs Error Codes - In-depth analysis on how fetch API drops HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 error codes, plus an ongoing proposal on how to fix it.
• 📜 The Siren Song of ariaNotify() - The new API pushes announcements straight to screen readers, replacing brittle aria-live hacks, but like alert(), its simplicity invites overuse.
• 📜 Do we still need build tools? - A look at common bundler tasks, and how native web standards now cover them. Bundling still wins for complex projects.
• 📜 Proxy and Reflect - The APIs behind proxy-based state libraries like Valtio and MobX.
• 📦 Native SDK - Author native desktop apps in TypeScript or Zig - Vercel Labs' toolkit compiles TS and declarative markup to a single native binary - no browser, no WebView, no JS engine, no GC. Supports macOS, Linux, Windows, and Mobile (experimental).
• 📦 npm 12.0 - Install scripts opt-in by default, 2FA-bypass token deprecation - Install-time code execution (preinstall/install/postinstall) is blocked by default with a soft-fail approach - major supply-chain hardening.

🤭 Fun

See ya! 👋