Using Native Driver For Animated

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

The serialization approach that makes this possible reveals an elegant pattern for offloading other performance-critical work to native.