React Native Blog Jan 12, 2023

React Native Version 0.71 Release

Article Summary

React Native 0.71 just dropped with TypeScript as the default, and it's the biggest developer experience upgrade in years. If you're still wrestling with layout spacing or accessibility props, this changes everything.

The React Native team released version 0.71 with six major feature areas spanning type safety, layout improvements, and web standards alignment. This release represents contributions from 70+ developers across 1000+ commits, focusing heavily on reducing friction for mobile developers.

Key Takeaways

Critical Insight

React Native 0.71 eliminates major developer pain points by making TypeScript the default, adding long-requested layout features, and dramatically improving build performance.

The PropTypes restoration story reveals an important lesson about deprecation warnings that every framework maintainer should read.

About This Article

Problem

React Native developers got deprecation warnings that LogBox was filtering out by mistake. This prevented people from migrating away from PropTypes, which were removed in version 0.68. The result was widespread errors when upgrading.

Solution

Facebook's React Native team brought PropTypes back in 0.71 and updated the deprecated-react-native-prop-types package. They also fixed LogBox so deprecation warnings would actually show up in the console.

Impact

Developers have a clearer path forward now. PropTypes are restored and console logging works properly, which makes it easier to migrate before PropTypes get removed again in future versions.