React Native's Using Native Driver For Animated
Original post Using Native Driver For Animated
Article Summary
Your React Native animations are probably running on the wrong thread. Here's how one config flag can eliminate frame drops when JavaScript gets blocked.
React Native's Animated library got a major performance upgrade through the Native Driver, a community effort led by developers from Expo, li.st, and the React Native core team. This technical deep dive explains how animations can now run entirely on the native UI thread instead of JavaScript.
Key Takeaways
- Animations serialize to native once, eliminating per-frame bridge calls
- Native driver uses CADisplayLink/Choreographer instead of requestAnimationFrame
- Enable with one line: useNativeDriver: true in animation config
- Works for transform and opacity, but not layout properties like flexbox
- Already powers Touchable components and React Navigation animations
By moving animation execution from JavaScript to native threads, React Native animations can run smoothly even when JS is blocked.
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Kasikornbank
Oct 14, 2026
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What This Article Covers
React Native animations ran JavaScript code on every frame and sent updates across the bridge to native code. When the JS thread got blocked by user code or React rendering, animations would skip frames.
Krzysztof Magiera and Brandon Withrow built a native driver that serializes the Animated API's node graph to native code at animation start. This lets the native side handle all frame updates directly on the UI thread without needing callbacks from JavaScript.
React Native 0.40 and later shipped with the native driver ready for production use. Touchable components and React Navigation adopted it, which meant animations stayed smooth even when JavaScript was busy doing other work.
This page summarizes “Using Native Driver For Animated” by React Native Blog, published Feb 14, 2017. All credit for the original work goes to the authors.
