React Native 36,878 grew out of a Facebook prototype by Jordan Walke, the creator of React 7,897 , that generated iOS interface elements from a background JavaScript thread. An internal hackathon turned it into a framework, which Facebook used in production in its Groups and Ads Manager apps and released for iOS as open source at F8 on 26 March 2015. Tom Occhino's announcement coined its motto, "learn once, write anywhere": not one app for every platform, but one set of skills for all of them. Android followed on 14 September 2015 with version 0.11.
The first architecture's asynchronous bridge limited performance, so in June 2018 the team announced a re-architecture. It took six years to ship because Meta migrated its own apps first:
| Version | Date | Milestone |
|---|---|---|
| 0.70 | Sep 2022 | Hermes 11,328 becomes the default engine |
| 0.74 | Apr 2024 | Bridgeless mode for New Architecture apps |
| 0.76 | Oct 2024 | New Architecture on by default |
| 0.82 | Oct 2025 | New Architecture only; opt-out flags ignored |
| 0.84 | Feb 2026 | Hermes V1 default; legacy code removal begins |
In October 2025 Meta announced that it would donate React, React Native and JSX to a new React Foundation, which launched under the Linux Foundation on 24 February 2026 with eight Platinum members: Amazon, Callstack, Expo 6,418 , Huawei, Meta, Microsoft, Software Mansion and Vercel 3,061 . Technical direction stays with the maintainers, not the board.