React Conf 2025 ran October 7 and 8 in Henderson, Nevada. Matt Carroll and Ricky Hanlon published the recap on October 16. Two keynotes carried the news: day one covered React itself, and day two covered React Native. Both streams are on YouTube, and the recap links each talk.
I sorted the announcements by what they ask of a working team, from upgrade-now items to things to watch.
Day one: React
- Joe Savona opened with team updates and the highlights of React 19.0 and 19.1.
- Mofei Zhang covered React 19.2: Activity, useEffectEvent, Performance Tracks and partial pre-rendering.
- Jack Pope showed two canary features:
<ViewTransition>for animated page changes, and Fragment refs for reaching the DOM nodes inside a Fragment. - Lauren Tan announced React Compiler 1.0 and recommended it for all apps.
- Seth Webster announced the React Foundation to steward React's open source work.
The compiler announcement carries the most weight for teams with existing code. It came with compiler-powered lint rules, compiler templates in Vite, Next.js and Expo, and migration guides. I wrote up a rollout plan for Compiler 1.0 in its own post. The short version: upgrade eslint-plugin-react-hooks today, even if you skip the compiler itself.
Fragment refs solve an old annoyance. Today, to measure or focus the children of a component that returns a Fragment, you add a wrapper div and break your layout. A ref on the Fragment itself lets you reach those DOM nodes without the extra element. It's canary only, so try it in a branch.
Day two: React Native
Jorge Cohen and Nicola Corti opened with the numbers:
- React Native weekly downloads
- 4M
- year-over-year growth
- 100%
They named migrations at Shopify, Zalando and HelloFresh, and AI apps from Mistral, Replit and v0. Riccardo Cipolleschi announced that React Native 0.82 runs only on the New Architecture and adds experimental Hermes V1. Rubén Norte and Alex Hunt closed with web-aligned DOM APIs and Web Performance APIs. Meta also used the conference to announce official support for Meta Quest, which the React Native blog detailed in February.
Talks worth your hour
| Talk | Speaker | Watch if |
|---|---|---|
| Async React, parts I and II | Ricky Hanlon | You want the model behind transitions, Suspense and Activity |
| In case you missed the memo | Cody Olsen | You plan a compiler rollout. Sanity Studio did one |
| Profiling with React Performance Tracks | Ruslan Lesiutin | You debug slow interactions |
| Reimagining Lists in React Native | Luna Wei | Your app lives in long lists |
| View Transitions and Activity | Chance Strickland | You want native-feeling page animations on the web |
| React Strict DOM | Nicolas Gallagher | You share UI code between web and native |
Luna Wei's talk introduced Virtual View, a list primitive with hidden, pre-render and visible modes. It borrows Activity's modes for list rows, and it's the talk I'd send to a React Native team first.
The framework block showed where server components are heading outside Next.js: Devon Govett on how Parcel bundles RSC, Kent C. Dodds on React Router's take, Peter Pistorius and Aurora Scharff on RedwoodSDK, and Tanner Linsley on TanStack Start. Evan Bacon covered Expo in 2025. If you picked Next.js because it was the only RSC option, those four talks show you the alternatives.
The foundation
Seth Webster's announcement got the least stage time and has the longest horizon. React moves from a Meta project to a foundation with several corporate members. Your code stays the same. The funding and the roadmap votes move. I covered the launch details when the foundation went live in February 2026.
What to do with it
| Act now | Plan this quarter | Watch |
|---|---|---|
| Upgrade eslint-plugin-react-hooks | Compiler rollout on one directory | ViewTransition and Fragment refs in canary |
| Profile with Performance Tracks | React Native New Architecture migration | Virtual View for lists |
- Watch the day one keynote with your team. It runs through 19.2 and the compiler faster than reading five posts.
- Turn on the compiler lint rules and fix what they report.
- If you ship React Native, put the 0.81 New Architecture test on the roadmap before 0.82 forces it.
- Pick one framework talk outside your current stack and watch it, so your next architecture decision has a real comparison.
Volodymyr Chornous