React Conf, Day 2 - My Thoughts

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In case you missed my notes from Day 1 of the conference, click here.

#ReactConf is over! Yesterday was Day 2 of the conference, and mostly focused on React Native. You can watch the VOD if you weren’t able to attend or watch at the time it was happening. In this blog post, I’ll go over my takeaways from this day of the conference. This will be a bit shorter than the previous post as I wasn’t able to catch all of the talks.

React Native is gaining in popularity

React Native (RN) doubled its weekly downloads from 2024 to 2025 and is currently at version 0.82. Additionally, it has over 2,700 contributors. The speaker, Nicola, demoed how you can debug RN apps using Radon IDE, which looked really cool! I have a RN project I’ve been meaning to finish for ~5 years so it looks like there will be a lot of new stuff to check out once I get to that.

React Strict DOM is the cross platform future for React

Nicolas Gallagher went over React Strict DOM (RSD), which is a cross-platform React framework that Meta has been developing. RSD is still under development, but the goal of the project is to enable React developers to write code that works for both web and native devices (iOS & Android).

Currently, if you want to make a website using React, you use React, but if you want to also have a mobile app, it is a separate React Native project with different code. RSD seeks to make this simpler so that one set of code powers both web and native: learn once, write once. However, the syntax would be different from what you currently write for React - for example, a <div> element would be <html.div>. That’s what their syntax looks like, at least right now.

This concept sounds awesome to me. If I could write one set of code that powers both a website and a native app that works on iOS and Android, it would be so much less work! I am thrilled to hear more about RSD and try it out when it is available, to grasp how it will really work.

Platform specific coding in React Native is already possible

One of the talks mentioned that React Native apps using Metro can have different code files for different platforms - e.g. component.native.tsx would be the code used to render the component on the native app, while component.web.tsx would be the code used for the React website. This sounded really cool to me. I wonder if it is some newer part of RN that came out in the last 5 years? My inexperience with RN is showing. 😅

Conclusion

Overall, I really enjoyed this conference. I thoroughly accomplished my intent of the conference:

I learned new things about React!
I got to see Kent C. Dodds talk! 🤩
I’m working on setting up a new React 19.3 canary project to test out all the new stuff!

I hope to attend other conferences too. I currently have my eyes set on DotNetConf, which is coming up in November.