React 7,897 grew out of a Facebook prototype by Jordan Walke, first called F-Bolt and then FaxJS. It shipped to the News Feed in 2011 and to Instagram in 2012, and was open-sourced at JSConf US in Facebook's Seattle office on 29 May
The reception was hostile: to an audience trained on templates and separation of concerns, mixing markup
into JavaScript looked like a step backward. The argument was settled by use rather than debate.
| Date | Release | What it introduced |
|---|---|---|
| 29 May 2013 | Open-sourced | Components, JSX, virtual DOM |
| 26 Sep 2017 | React 16 | Fiber, portals, MIT license |
| Feb 2019 | React 16.8 | Hooks in function components |
| 29 Mar 2022 | React 18 | Concurrent rendering, batching |
| 5 Dec 2024 | React 19 | Actions, use, refs as props |
| 9 Sep 2026 | React 19.3 | View Transitions, fragment refs |
Two of those rows changed how React code looks. Hooks in 16.8 made the class component obsolete for new work: state, lifecycle and context all became function calls, and the render/componentDidMount/this.setState vocabulary faded. Fiber in 16 was invisible at the time but made React 18's concurrent rendering possible, and with it Suspense, transitions and streaming server rendering.
The licensing history still comes up in interviews. From late 2014 React carried a three-clause BSD license plus a patent grant that terminated if you sued Facebook over patents. The Apache Software Foundation ruled that incompatible with its own projects, WordPress 48 said it would look elsewhere, and on 22 September 2017 Facebook relicensed React, Jest 62,362 , Flow and Immutable.js 33,033 under plain MIT, shipping the change with React 16. Governance moved next: the React Foundation, announced on 7 October 2025 and launched on 24 February 2026, holds the trademark and stewardship of React and React Native 36,878 under the Linux Foundation.