With Animated (Animated API), everything interactive, such as following a finger or animating a height, still passes through JavaScript. Two libraries from Software Mansion remove that round trip. React Native Reanimated 11,010 runs your animation code itself on the UI thread, and React Native Gesture Handler 6,788 recognizes touches there with the platform's own gesture system. Together they are the standard for gesture-driven motion in React Native 36,878 , and Expo SDK 57 6,418 pins a version of each. The demos live in src/rea/ of the BookNest project and ran on the Android 16 emulator.