DEV Community: The React Native Rewind

Desk Racers Built From a Photograph, Purple Gradients Sent Back to the Kitchen, and a Security Backlog That Finally Got Help

The React Native Rewind — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:33:08 +0000

You’re reading The Agentic Rewind #2.

A Noble Gas With a Long Attention Span

Argon is a noble gas, which means it doesn't react to anything.

And that, in a way, is rather wonderful.

On October 13, Google released Gemini 4 Argon, and the idea is beautifully simple: give it a big task and walk away.

Koray Kavukcuoglu (@koraykv) introduced it as a model trained to work longer and remember more than any Gemini before it.

It plans, writes the code, checks its own work, and keeps going long after we'd have closed the laptop and gone to look at the stars.

So what actually changed?

Earlier Gemini models could only write 64K tokens before they had to stop.

Argon shares one 1M-token window across everything it reads, thinks and writes.

So a single call can return a whole multi-file change, not half a function.

To go past 64K tokens, you run the request in background mode.

let interaction = await client.interactions.create({
  model: "gemini-4-argon",
  input:
    "Write a complete, rigorous proof " +
    "of the prime number theorem.",
  // past 64K output tokens needs background mode
  background: true,
  generation_config: {
    max_output_tokens: 262144,
    thinking_level: "high",
  },
});

Then you check back with client.interactions.get until it's finished, which is Google's polite way of saying go and make a coffee.

What does a long run look like?

Google's showpiece is Desk Racer.

Argon took photos of a real desk and, working inside Antigravity, Google's agent-first coding tool, turned them into a playable miniature racing game.

It built the 3D scene with Blender MCP, painted it with Nano Banana, and wired up the physics and engine sounds in Three.js.

The track loops around the keyboard, the mouse and the desk lamp, a tiny universe built from a photograph.

Every race starts with a countdown on the line, and you can try it yourself in AI Studio.

Does it actually ship better code?

Google says its teams shipped over 35% more agent-written code with Argon, with nearly a third fewer rollbacks.

It also says Argon rarely cheats now, like skipping a failing test, doing it just 2% of the time.

Pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 for output, doubling on December 1.

Our desks have never looked more productive.

Mostly because they never had a racetrack before.

This just made me want to play a round of Mario Kart (who are we kidding… more than one round, probably until I finish last three times in a row, hit by every evil banana and turtle shell going).

👉 Gemini 4 Argon

Taste the Rainbow, Fail the Gradient

Right, ask any coding agent for a landing page, and what do you get?

A purple gradient, a centred headline, three feature cards, and a testimonial from someone who doesn't exist.

It's bland, it's lazy, and we've all been served it a thousand times.

Leon Lin (@LexnLin) shipped version 2 of Taste Skill on October 13, and its whole job is to send that page back before anyone sees it.

It's an Agent Skill (a folder of instructions your coding agent loads when it needs them) for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

What's new in version two?

It's not the old recipe reheated.

Instead of vague advice like "make it modern", it gives the agent a real library of designs, built from a study of 247 hand-picked sites.

The agent is dealt three design directions and has to pick the one that fits this particular client.

It also pulls real photos and maps from open collections like Wikimedia Commons and Openverse, with credits on the page.

# install the v2 default skill
npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill \
  --skill "design-taste-frontend"

# deal three directions for the brief
node <skill>/scripts/draw.mjs --sector <sector> \
  --brief "<one line>" --sections <roles> --options 3

# the gate the agent has to pass
node <skill>/scripts/lint.mjs <source files or folder>
node <skill>/scripts/inspect.mjs <url or path/to/index.html>

That last line is the head chef, tasting every plate before it goes out.

inspect.mjs opens the page in a real browser on desktop, tablet and phone widths, and rejects it for gradients, shadows and other usual suspects.

The agent looks at its own screenshots, fixes the worst three problems and tries again, up to three times.

Does it actually look different?

Here's a coffee shop page it made from a single brief, with a drawn storefront at the top.

And here's a techno night that prints its dates right onto an old photo of an industrial hall.

The catch is time: a build takes 30 to 45 minutes and a few hundred thousand tokens.

It's also meant for public pages, not dashboards or app screens.

Somewhere, a purple gradient is updating its LinkedIn profile.

Shut it down.

👉 Taste Skill

📦 Gemini 4 Argon

Google's new frontier model is GA in the API, AI Studio, and Antigravity at an intro $2/$10 per million tokens until Nov 30… and it already untangled a ~6 million line folder of legacy Chrome code, so your monolith is next.

📦 HydraFusion Max

Copilot's multi-model blender now pulls from Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna, with parallel critics poking the actual workspace… Max cranks the reasoning for when "balanced" isn't the vibe.

📦 Codex 0.163 Mid-Turn Steering

Send a follow-up while Codex is mid-response and it steers right away, plus searchable /config and read-only tools running in parallel… finally, a way to say "no, not that file" before it's too late.

📦 Cline Cloud Sessions

Run a Cline task in a hosted sandbox on the repo and branch you pick, and it keeps going after you close your editor… rolling out gradually, and unpinned Cline-provider users now default to Gemini 4 Argon.

📦 Shop MCP

Shopify's hosted MCP server lets any agent search 1B+ products, build a cart, and finish Shop Pay checkout without bouncing the shopper to a website… search doesn't even need an API key, which your credit card may find concerning.

📦 GitLab MCP Server GA

Shipped with GitLab 19.5: semantic code search, pipeline debugging, toolsets, and Duo Agent Platform flows you can kick off from Claude Code or Cursor… all under your existing GitLab permissions, on every tier including Free.

📦 Copilot Agentic Autofix

Now GA: assign a code scanning alert to Copilot and it explores the codebase, re-runs CodeQL to validate the fix, and opens a draft PR… up to 25 alerts at once, so the security backlog finally gets an intern.

📦 Copilot CLI Agent-Scoped Hooks

1.0.97 lets custom agents carry their own declarative hooks, and Autopilot now denies a hook's "ask" instead of freezing on a permission dialog nobody is watching… RIP the 3am prompt that patiently waited until 9am.

📦 Claude Code Retry Watchdog Cap

v2.1.301 adds CLAUDE_CODE_RETRY_WATCHDOG_MAX_USAGE_LIMIT_WAIT_MS, so unattended retry mode gives up on a usage limit that resets too far away… instead of sitting there all weekend like a dog at the door.

📝 How the Claude Code Team Does Code Review

Claude writes about 90% of Claude Code, merged PRs more than doubled from June to September, and reverts fell over 40%… plus the tale of one PR that did 50+ review rounds overnight before anyone stopped it.

Authored by Luke Farrell and edited by Fran Ríos.

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, why not help us grow? Share it with your friends, family, and even that one coworker who always “forgets” to update dependencies. Use this link: https://theagenticrewind.com/.

A Butler Who Never Reads the Diff, 1,000-Page Contracts in 56 Milliseconds, and a Phone That Knows How Far It's Folded

The React Native Rewind — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 08:47:51 +0000

You’re reading The React Native Rewind #62.

Siri Swears the PR Is Reviewed

Good evening, Master Wayne.

I've read the changelog, so you needn't.

Expo SDK 58 arrived on October 15, announced by Alan Hughes and Brent Vatne.

And for once, sir, the headline is not a fresh way to break your Podfile.

So what happened to the Simulator?

Xcode 27 has retired Simulator.app, and the new expo-device-hub plugin turns your browser into a device dashboard instead.

It streams your iOS simulators and Android emulators, and you can tap, swipe and type straight into them.

Next to them sit live CPU, memory and network graphs, a bit like the screens in the Batcave.

Here it is running an iPhone 17 Pro Max simulator, courtesy of Nathan Schroeder (@nater02).

To try it, run npx expo install expo-device-hub, then npx expo start, and the link will be waiting in your terminal.

Can Siri finally talk to our apps?

The household has a new member of staff, sir.

The alpha package expo-app-intents lets Siri, Shortcuts and Spotlight trigger actions in your app.

App Intents (Apple's way of describing what your app can do) still have to be declared in Swift.

Expo queues every request for your JavaScript, so Siri can take an order even when your app is closed.

import * as AppIntents from 'expo-app-intents';

export function AppIntentHandler() {
  AppIntents.useAppIntents(async (pendingIntents) => {
    for (const invocation of pendingIntents) {
      // Siri may have queued this while the app was closed
      console.log(invocation.name, invocation.params);
      await AppIntents.removePendingInvocationAsync(
        invocation.id,
      );
    }
  });

  return null;
}

npx expo-app-intents init sets up the Swift side for you.

In Expo's demo, Siri asks which task to mark as complete and flips the toggle in the app.

I regret to report that Siri marked "Review pull requests" as done without reading a single line.

Every bit as thorough as you on a Friday, sir.

Is the bundler any faster?

SDK 58 adds Noxcturnal, an experimental Metro transformer written in Rust with oxc.

In Expo's test, a 5,500-file app went from 5.26 seconds on Babel to 2.46 seconds, about twice as fast.

Phil Pluckthun (@_philpl) shared the timeline, with the new transformer finished at the top and Babel still working below.

You turn it on with experiments.noxcturnalTransformWorker, and it politely steps aside if you use custom Babel plugins.

Will that be all, sir?

👉 Expo SDK 58

Two Days of React in an Old London Brewery

React Advanced London is back on October 23 and 26, 2026.

IT'S THIS FU**ING FRIDAY!!!!

And we are obviously gonna be there, so if you are in London, come say hi and make our day.

The first day, October 23, is in person at The Brewery, a London venue on the site of an 18th-century brewery, and it's streamed online for everyone who can't make it.

The second day, October 26, is fully remote, so wherever you are, you still get two days of advanced React engineering.

You'll be joining 800+ engineers for 40+ talks and workshops, given by the library authors and core contributors who build the stuff you ship.

The big topics this year are React Server Components, the React Compiler and AI-assisted development.

And because this is The React Native Rewind, we have to point out there's also a talk on building game UIs in Unreal Engine with React Native.

Want a last-minute discount? Reach out to Luke or Fran.

👉 Reserve your spot at reactadvanced.com

PDF Now Stands for Pretty Damn Fast

Some say every app eventually gets a support ticket that says "just show the PDF".

And some say that the moment someone opens a 1,000-page scanned contract on a cheap Android phone, the app turns into a hand warmer.

All we know is, react-native-better-pdf hit 1.0 on October 12, built by Jakub Kasprzyk (@jkasprzyk17) and the team at GMI Software.

What's wrong with the old one?

For years, the default has been react-native-pdf, which on Android ships its own PDF engine, PDFium, inside your app.

That's like towing a caravan to a drag race.

better-pdf ditches the caravan and uses the engines the phone already has: PDFKit on iOS and PdfRenderer on Android.

It's built on Nitro Views from Margelo, so there's no WebView and no JavaScript slowing down scrolling or zooming.

Only the pages on screen are kept in memory, no matter how long the lawyers chose to write.

import { PdfView } from 'react-native-better-pdf';

export function Reader() {
  return (
    <PdfView
      style={{ flex: 1 }}
      source={{ uri: 'https://example.com/report.pdf' }}
      onLoad={({ pageCount }) =>
        console.log('pages', pageCount)
      }
    />
  );
}

That's the entire reader.

How fast are we talking?

In the README's latest Android benchmark, the 1,000-page scan opens in 56 ms instead of 622 ms.

It also peaks at 142 MB of memory instead of 898 MB.

POWERRRR.

The race below is a separate run, so its numbers differ a little, but the gap doesn't.

In fairness, and we hate fairness, on iOS both libraries use PDFKit, so there the gap mostly vanishes.

What else is in the box?

Version 1.0 comes with search, fillable forms, offline caching and printing.

Search and forms answer two react-native-pdf feature requests that have been sitting open since 2021 and 2023.

Here's a form being filled in, straight from the launch video.

The catch is that you need the New Architecture and react-native-nitro-modules.

But c’mon, at this point who hasn’t moved to the New Architecture?

Anybody? Raise your hand. Anybody? Anybody?

We’ll love you anyway, but unlike our love, updates aren’t unconditional.

There's even an agent skill, so your coding agent can do the migration while we pretend to read the contract.

And on that bombshell…

👉 react-native-better-pdf

📦 React Native 0.88

Events now travel the web’s EventTarget path with real capture and bubbling, Text and TextInput get variable fonts through fontVariationSettings, and iOS picks up SceneDelegate support before Xcode 27 stops launching apps without it... and for the third time this year, no user-facing breaking changes.

📦 Expo SDK 58

Built for iOS 27 and React Native 0.88, with iPhone Duo support, a new expo-hinge package that tells you exactly how open your phone is, and expo-app-intents in alpha so Siri can finally tick off your onboarding checklist for you.

📦 EAS CLI 25

Cloud simulator sessions now default to signed-in preview links, and 25.2 adds eas simulator:control for poking a remote iOS simulator and moving files on and off it... the Mac under your desk is now officially someone else’s problem.

📦 React Native Gesture Handler 3.4

Swift Package Manager builds on iOS, a new immediatePressOut prop for Touchable, and Android now fires onPressIn when the press actually starts... rather than whenever it got round to it.

📦 React Native Screens 4.30

Stack v4 gets ready for iOS 27 and iPhone Duo and lays screens out properly under opaque headers on iOS 26+, though when the header bugs were reported, Apple simply pointed at its guidance against custom bar backgrounds... so maybe just go transparent.

📦 React Native Nano Icons 1.0

The first stable release hot reloads edited SVGs through a Metro plugin, turns them into SF Symbols and VectorDrawables for native tab bars, and lets Reanimated animate their size and color... so nudging an icon no longer costs you a native rebuild.

📦 React Native Skia 3.7

Eight releases in five days land Skia m157, and Android phones without Vulkan now get pointed back to v2 instead of crashing... the Graphite herd leaves nobody behind on the savanna.

📦 react-native-gpui

Nate (@natebirdman) renders React Native components with GPUI, the GPU-accelerated Rust framework behind the Zed editor, straight into a Metal window on the Mac... no browser, no Electron, and Apple Silicon only for now.

📦 beUI for React Native

Saurabh (@saurra3h) brought 45 free animated components built on Reanimated, Gesture Handler and Uniwind, and npx beui-native add tabs copies one straight into your app... you own the code, and the bugs.

📦 rn-build-doctor

Priyanka (@lassiecoder) built an offline tool that reads your React Native or Expo build or crash log and tells you the real cause, with evidence and next steps... it reads the whole Gradle stack trace so you don’t have to.

📦 Relaunching TeamReach

Gene Cornfield wrote up moving 5,000,000 active users to a rebuilt Expo app overnight, then shipping twelve OTA updates in three days to fix what testing missed... and the whole rescue cost about $4,000.

Authored by Luke Farrell and edited by Fran Ríos.

The Great Graphite Migration, Derek Joins Fat Fighters, and a Leaderboard for Your Dependency Tree

The React Native Rewind — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

You’re reading The React Native Rewind #61.

The Great Graphite Migration

Out on the open plains of React Native, a great change is underway...

William Candillon (@wcandillon) has released React Native Skia 3.0, and he announced it with a stream called Hello Graphite.

The renderer now runs on WebGPU (WebGL is a browser version of OpenGL, which is how web pages draw 3D graphics).

OpenGL, the herd leader for decades, has been driven out of the group.

OpenGL is the old graphics API that phones have relied on to draw every pixel on screen for as long as anyone can remember.

Skia is the 2D graphics engine used by Chrome, Android and Flutter, and it is the engine of choice for some of the mightiest apps on the planet.

React Native Skia brings that engine to React Native, so you can draw shapes, text, images and shaders onto a <Canvas> using ordinary React components.

Observe, here, a small shader, drawn with Skia’s web build (CanvasKit).

const effect = CanvasKit.RuntimeEffect.Make(`
  uniform float2 size;
  uniform float time;
  half4 main(float2 xy) {
    float d = length(xy / size - 0.5);
    float rings = sin(d * 40.0 - time * 4.0) * 0.5 + 0.5;
    half3 orange = half3(0.973, 0.659, 0.137);
    return half4(orange * rings + half3(0.08) * (1.0 - rings), 1.0);
  }`);
paint.setShader(effect.makeShader([W, H, t]));
canvas.drawRect(CanvasKit.XYWHRect(0, 0, W, H), paint);
canvas.drawCircle(W / 2, H / 2, 60 + 30 * Math.sin(t * Math.PI), stroke);

And there they are, rippling rings surrounding a pulsing circle, the wild rings of a wild developer.

So what changed in 3.0?

Skia’s backend, the part that converts “draw a circle” into GPU instructions, was once Ganesh, which is not the Hindu god, though it was also based on OpenGL.

Version 3.0 replaces Ganesh with Graphite.

Graphite runs on Dawn, Google’s WebGPU implementation, and Dawn talks to Metal on Apple devices and to Vulkan on Android.

As William points out, Graphite fixes the stability and performance problems of the OpenGL design, which had been struggling on the savanna for years.

But why should a developer care?

Because the first win is multithreading by default. Drawings can be recorded on any thread, and only the finished frame is allowed to reach the UI thread.

The second win is that Skia and React Native WebGPU now share the same GPU device.

A texture, an image held in GPU memory, passes between them without being copied, which is nothing short of a miracle in the GPU world.

The docs include a recipe for drawing a three.js scene inside a Skia canvas.

const device = importDevice(Skia.getNativeDevice());
const target = makeOffscreenTarget(device, width, height);
const renderer = new THREE.WebGPURenderer({
  canvas: target.context.canvas,
  context: target.context,
  device,
});
await renderer.init();
renderer.setAnimationLoop(() => {
  renderer.render(scene, camera);
  const previous = image.value;
  // Same GPU device, so the frame is wrapped, not copied
  image.value = Skia.Image.MakeImageFromGPUTexture(target.texture);
  previous?.dispose();
});

The scene arrives as a plain <Image> inside your <Canvas>, ready for blurs, shaders and text to be stacked on top.

Video and camera frames receive the same zero-copy treatment, which is kinder to the battery, and the battery is the most vulnerable creature in the whole ecosystem.

The community did not wait for permission.

Paul Nguyen (@paulNguyenJS) combined Skia v3, React Native WebGPU and Reanimated 4 to turn the Dynamic Island into a UFO.

Where did @shopify go?

Version 3 is published as react-native-skia, while @shopify/react-native-skia stops at 2.14, like a pride of lions that has walked off the map.

The repository now lives on William’s GitHub, and the drawing API is unchanged, so most apps only need to rename imports and bump platform versions.

OpenGL had a long reign on the savanna...

But the Graphite herd has moved on, and nobody is going back to the water hole for it.

Goodbye, OpenGL.

👉 React Native Skia

Derek, Welcome to Fat Fighters

You asked React Native for a View...

And it sent 448 files, 80,000 lines of JavaScript, a Slider, a DatePicker, a Switch, and a Modal your app never used.

We didn’t break up with my exes to be dragging all that extra luggage around.

So come on now, that is a lot to carry for a single View.

Davyd NRB, who goes by @tell_me_mur on X, wrote a Babel plugin called babel-plugin-react-native-direct-imports, which rewrites each react-native import so that importing View pulls in only the View file.

Right, so what does that actually mean?

The plugin changes every react-native import so that it points straight at the file where that component is defined.

Let’s look at the problem first, shall we?

When you write import { View } from 'react-native', you are importing from react-native/index.js, which is a barrel (one file that re-exports everything in the package).

That barrel uses CommonJS, with a lazy require() getter for each public API, so bundlers cannot tree-shake the barrel, which means they cannot drop the parts of React Native that your app never touches.

So one View drags all of React Native into your bundle, PushNotificationIOS included, and you never once asked for PushNotificationIOS.

Now, what does the plugin actually do about it?

At build time, the plugin swaps the barrel import for direct requires of the underlying modules.

import { View, AppRegistry, Systrace } from 'react-native';

// ↓ becomes

const View = require('react-native/Libraries/Components/View/View').default;
const AppRegistry = require('react-native/Libraries/ReactNative/AppRegistry').AppRegistry;
const Systrace = require('react-native/Libraries/Performance/Systrace');

When we ran version 1.1.0 with a three-name import and the 0.87.1 map, the result was:

Now for the numbers, and yes, there are numbers.

The author built an iOS app that imports only ReactNativeVersion, then bundled it twice, once without the plugin and once with it.

Without the plugin, the bundle came to 711.93 KB.

With the plugin, the bundle shrank to 10.62 KB.

Here are the two bundle reports side by side.

It’s a toy app, so your real savings will be smaller, mostly because you’ll be importing more of React Native on purpose, hopefully.

Right, how do you get on the plan?

Install the plugin as a dev dependency, add it to your babel.config.js with the exact React Native version you have, and turn off the deep-import warnings in the preset.

module.exports = {
  presets: [
    ['module:@react-native/babel-preset', { disableDeepImportWarnings: true }],
  ],
  plugins: [
    process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'test' && [
      'react-native-direct-imports',
      { reactNativeVersion: require('react-native/package.json').version },
    ],
  ].filter(Boolean),
};

Then clear the Metro cache once, with either npx react-native start --reset-cache or npx expo start --clear.

Any catches?

Yes, and the catch is the upgrade.

The plugin writes React Native’s internal file paths into your build, and those paths change between releases.

Each version from 0.70.0 has its own map, and the build fails unless your React Native version matches one of those maps exactly.

So every React Native upgrade now needs two steps. Upgrade React Native, then upgrade babel-plugin-react-native-direct-imports to the matching version.

Skip the second step and the build fails with an error that never mentions the plugin, so you’ll spend an afternoon rereading your config.

Your bundle loses 700 KB, and your upgrade checklist gains a line.

Now, let’s all say it together…

Bye bye, fatty bundle!

👉 babel-plugin-react-native-direct-imports

📦 React Native 0.88.0-rc.4

TypeScript module augmentation can now extend generated props and style types, and an Android Pressable that went half-untappable after being disabled and re-enabled finally gets its fingers back... stable 0.88 is scheduled for October 12, so this might be the final dress rehearsal.

📦 Tamagui 3.0

A new C++ native runtime pushes theme changes straight to native views through Fabric without re-rendering React, plus flat style props, React Strict DOM and Tailwind classes... and the release notes politely suggest you hand the upgrade guide to your coding agent.

📦 React Native Skia 3.4

William Candillon (@wcandillon) moved Skia 3 onto Graphite, so Android now draws with Vulkan instead of OpenGL (minSdk is 26), and 3.4 brings Graphite and Dawn to tvOS... so your living room can finally render shaders nobody asked for.

📦 React Native Screens 4.29.0

iOS Tabs move to Apple's UITab API on iOS 26.1+, picking up a search tab, sidebar placement for iOS 27 and custom tab icons... while Android fragments learn to leave the room without crashing.

📦 React Native Testing Library 14.1

Maciej Jastrzębski (@mdj_dev) shipped userEvent.pullToRefresh(), accessibilityAction(), fireEvent.layout() and a warning when your test pokes a disabled element... plus React Native 0.88 and React 19.3 support.

📦 Unistyles 3.5

A stability release where theme changes finally reach the components they were skipping, reload memory leaks get plugged, and unfreezing a screen no longer blocks JS for whole seconds.

📦 EAS CLI 24.12

eas update:view --json now hands back signed source map and asset map URLs, and 24.11 added browser device login with resumable commands for chat agents... so even your coding agent has to sign in now.

📦 React Native Brownfield 5.3

npm create @callstack/react-native-brownfield scaffolds packaging targets into an existing React Native CLI project, and 5.2 added Expo SDK 58 and AGP 9 support for the apps that only let React Native in through the side door.

📦 munim-maps

Sheehan Munim (@sheehanmunim) put animated 3D cars, rockets, satellites and people on their actual floor onto Apple Maps with Nitro Modules... and it also speaks Google Maps, Mapbox, MapLibre and Cesium.

📦 react-native-inkpad

Mohamed Rayen Sbai (@WeskerTN) built a native ink canvas on androidx.ink and PencilKit with pen, marker, highlighter and eraser, and no WebView... coming from react-native-signature-canvas means changing one import.

📦 skia-diagrams

@ryuhzk renders Mermaid diagrams natively with Skia 3, with themes, animations and pan/zoom across 31 flowchart types... not a WebView in sight.

📦 React Native Directory

@Simek added a /stats page, a list of which packages depend on a package, and AGENTS.md previews... finally a leaderboard for your dependency tree.

Authored by Luke Farrell and edited by Fran Ríos.

A Cute Beret With Root Access

The React Native Rewind — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:34:16 +0000

At OpenAI's DevDay on September 29, there were many announcements.

But the one that will get the most screen time is a fluffy blob wearing a beret…

Because Silicon Valley has finally admitted its ideal coworker is a plush toy with root access.

Dots are always-on agents, driven by GPT-6 Astra, which work for you round the clock.

You name your dot, link your apps, and then talk to it as you would to a colleague who never logs off, never steals your milk, and never “circles back” after quietly doing nothing.

Well, what is a dot then?

Imagine OpenAI just copied Grok Bot… well…

Each dot is given its own cloud computer together with its own browser, and is able to access more than 4,000 apps via OpenAI's plugins.

You can message it through ChatGPT, Slack or Teams, or just call it ~~when you are missing your ex~~ whenever typing seems like too much of an effort.

If you're not talking to it, it carries out what OpenAI refers to as "proactive research" in the background…

Which is corporate for “it is already in your Calendar judging your life choices.”

It does this using read-only tools, so it can browse around your apps without sending any messages or making any changes.

Technically stalking… but with a compliance stamp.

What does that mean for developers?

OpenAI's developer example is a dot that monitors customer feedback, identifies minor fixes, develops and tests them, and then brings you completed pull requests with videos attached.

Your backlog just got a new predator.

Below, a dot named Iggy notices that an app's iOS beta checklist can no longer be found after the most recent deployment, offers to restore it, and has the fix ready for review before any code is merged.

Meanwhile, your human teammate is still opening Jira…

Who decides what it's allowed to do?

Before the dot carries out any action which could affect your accounts or involve sharing information, auto-review checks it against your instructions, your Custom Rules and OpenAI's safety requirements.

You can see everything it does, including the background work, in Activity View, which is either transparency or a highlight reel of how replaceable you are.

Can we get one?

Dots are being made available to Pro and Business Premium users.

And Enterprise admins can turn on a beta… presumably after a 47-slide security review titled:

“What If The Beret Goes Rogue.”

OpenAI is also running trials of specialist dots for companies, each of which has its own identity and access, and bringing them to Microsoft Agent 365.

Because nothing says “future of work” like a fluffy blob inside a Microsoft admin centre.

If I get one, I'm picking the frog!

👉 Dots

Want more from The Agentic Rewind #1? The full issue also covers Callstack's Apex (the Pixel Canary reveal) and this week's pack of agent links.

👉 Subscribe free at theagenticrewind.com and get every issue in your inbox.

From The Agentic Rewind #1. Read the full issue here.

Scooby-Doo, It’s Just Apex!

The React Native Rewind — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:06:22 +0000

At the end of September…

A mystery model known as Pixel Canary appeared on Vercel AI Gateway.

On October 1, it removed the mask in Scooby-Doo fashion and turned out to be Callstack.

And we would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling benchmarkers!

Pixel Canary is Apex, a coding model designed for everyday agent tasks, and it is now available to the public.

The model is particularly strong in React Native and Next.js, which is either a coincidence or the most transparent flex since someone named a crypto coin after themselves.

What did it build while it was undercover?

During the stealth week, Michał Pierzchała (@thymikee) asked it to cook “something” overnight in OpenCode and came back to a SpaceX launch tracker… which is the agentic equivalent of leaving a teenager alone with DoorDash and finding a Michelin reservation.

It's called Orbit Watch, featuring a Skia globe, Reanimated worklets and native tabs on Expo 57, and it used agent-device (an open-source CLI that lets AI agents control and test your app on iOS and Android devices) to verify its own work.

Pixel Canary got through over 200 billion tokens in just five days.

But… is it any good?

On the React Native evals, it lands within a point of Claude Opus 5.5 and outperforms GPT-6.1 Sol, all at about a quarter of the cost of a full Opus run.

On the Next.js evals carried out by Vercel, it completed 28 out of 31 tasks, matching GPT-6 Astra on high effort, and 30 out of 31 with the Next.js docs in AGENTS.md.

Reading the docs still works… who would have guessed!?

Callstack also tested code review on the Expensify repo using both Apex and Opus 5.5.

It's one run only, not a benchmark, but the fact that it's six times faster and 85% cheaper is difficult to ignore…

Unless your personality is powered exclusively by vendor lock-in.

What does it cost, and how do we use it?

The rate is 50 cents per million input tokens, 20 cents for cached input and $3.00 per million output tokens, compared to $20 per million output tokens for Opus 5.5.

It has a 256K context window and an API that is compatible with both OpenAI and Anthropic, enabling tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex to use it without rewriting your entire religion.

Run:

npx @callstack/apex init

And it will locate the coding tools on your machine and point them at Apex.

In the past, canaries were sent down the mines to warn the miners when there was a problem.

This one goes into your codebase…

The only warning it gives is about your Opus bill.

And hopefully you don’t find it dead after a few hours of intense work,

👉 Apex

Want the rest of The Agentic Rewind #1? Part 2 covers OpenAI's beret-wearing Dots, plus this week's pack of agent links (GPT-6.1 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Pi 1.0 and more).

👉 Subscribe free at theagenticrewind.com and get every issue in your inbox.

This is #Part1 of The Agentic Rewind #1. Read the full issue here.

Mega Carrots for Monty, Angular Through the Sliding Door, and Lynx on Foldables

The React Native Rewind — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

You're reading The React Native Rewind #60.

Swipe Right on Codex, Neeee-igh!

Codex (OpenAI's coding agent) has long been quite good at writing mobile code.

It just never got the opportunity to see the app that it was writing.

On October 2, Callstack and Margelo launched Mobile Dev.

A plugin which places live iOS and Android devices right beside the Codex desktop chat.

That's Monty, aged 9, on the iPhone simulator and Juniper, aged 5, on the Android emulator, both of them on a demo dating app known as HorseTinder.

We won't inquire as to why horses need a dating app…

We have seen weirder things at this point.

Monty is taking a mirror selfie in a hoodie, so really he's doing better than most of us.

So what can Codex do with a device?

It can boot simulators and emulators, tap, drag and type, and read the accessibility tree using MCP tools (Model Context Protocol, the standard method for agents to call tools; at some point we should asume you already know this… maybe today xd).

You can also click on any item on the screen and leave a note, which in React Native apps, includes the component together with its source file.

Here, someone selects the Super Like star and requests a "Mega Carrot" in orange.

Codex makes edits to two files, so the star becomes a carrot…

And Monty is presumably able to attract a better sort of match.

What happens when it crashes?

Metro's console, iOS unified logs, Android logcat all end up in a single panel, and an error can be sent directly to the chat.

And performance?

Ask it to record an interaction and it will capture the CPU and memory, then draw the charts directly in the chat. The image below shows 30 seconds of card swiping on an iPhone 17 Pro simulator, with the CPU reaching a peak of 22.7%.

How do you get it?

You need the Codex desktop app on an Apple Silicon Mac, plus Xcode 26 or later (Xcode 27 if you want to use physical iPhones).

# Add Callstack's marketplace, pinned to the release branch
GH=https://github.com/callstackincubator
codex plugin marketplace add \
  $GH/codex-mobile-dev-plugin.git --ref release/latest
codex plugin add mobile-dev@mobile-dev

It is based on MCP Apps and on the plugin extensions that OpenAI announced at DevDay.

And it will soon be available on the Codex plugin marketplace.

Monty has still not found love…

But now anyone who swipes right on him is going to get the Mega Carrot.

👉 Mobile Dev for Codex

Ay-oh, Another One Bites the Dust

Coinbase is pulling out of React Native after 5 years.

Coinbase is also paying engineers to keep the React Native app in sync until the Swift and Kotlin apps are ready...

So Coinbase is pulling out very slowly, which any SexEd teacher will tell you doesn't count.

Adam Wolf, a Senior Engineering Manager there, says AI coding agents have "collapsed the cost of building a feature twice".

While one tenant packed boxes, another moved in.

Ashley Hunter (@ashh640) launched Angular Native on September 29.

Angular apps that draw as real UIView and android.view.View.

It’s built on Expo and React Native’s New Architecture…

Wait… What!?

Angular’s Renderer2 (the layer that draws somewhere other than the browser DOM) feeds a small engine, @ng-native/fabric, which talks straight to Fabric (React Native’s C++ view renderer).

Svelte (a UI framework that compiles your components into plain JavaScript at build time, so there’s no virtual DOM runtime like React) shows up in the diagram below too…

We’ll get to it in a minute.

You write ordinary Angular templates with <view>, <text>, and <pressable>, which output real React Native views, styled with real CSS and Tailwind (ios: / android: variants).

And Angular isn’t the only unexpected guest at Lord Fabric’s table.

Svelte isn’t “based on React Native” either…

But @wobsoriano hooked Svelte 5’s custom renderer into that same @ng-native/fabric engine.

So Svelte ALSO gets real native views without writing its own Fabric bridge.

That means… drum roll…

Angular and Svelte can use Expo modules.

Think… camera, notifications, file system, haptics, blur, image picker, audio…

React Native is quietly becoming the native layer under everyone else’s frontend.

Now the old king is dead!

Long live React Native!

👉 Angular Native

📦 React Native 0.88.0-rc.3

The third RC bumps Hermes to kill a quadratic slowdown in lazy compilation, and stops SwiftPM autolinking from recreating library packages on every sync... which was quietly breaking Xcode for libraries that ship their own Package.swift.

📦 Lynx 4.0

ByteDance's framework now adapts to foldables like the iPhone Duo, understands CSS media queries, and open-sources a Liquid Glass blur view plus a WebView... and despite the big version number, nothing breaks.

📦 Lucent

Write native modules in TypeScript, compile them to C++ via JSI, and skip Swift or Kotlin entirely... with an experimental mode that turns JSX into SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, which is either the future or a very elaborate dare.

📦 React Navigation 7.23

Satyajit Sahoo (@satya164) added tabBarRepeatedPressBehavior for when you tap the tab you're already on: scroll to top, pop the nested stack, or both... and the same option landed in the v8 alpha too.

📦 Reanimated 4.7.1

Stability fixes for layout animations and shared element transitions, a handful of Android crashes, and sync prop updates that stop snapping back when a sibling's zIndex shuffles the deck.

📦 React Native macOS 0.83

Microsoft synced react-native-macos with React Native 0.83.10, the first 0.83 for Mac... desktop is only four versions behind, which for desktop counts as keeping up.

📦 expo-modules-cli 0.2.0

Tomasz Sapeta (@tsapeta) added generate-types, which writes TypeScript types for your Expo module straight from its Swift... so they come from what native actually exports, not what you remember.

📦 EAS CLI 24.10.0

eas simulator --network-capture records HTTP traffic on Expo's cloud simulator (headers and bodies optional), and since 24.9 eas update --upload-source-maps means OTA stack traces finally point at real lines.

📦 Apex

Callstack's React Native coding model is generally available after a stealth run as Pixel Canary on Vercel AI Gateway... $0.50/M input and $3/M output, so your agent can afford a few more retries before lunch.

📦 expo-meta-wearables-dat 2.2.0

The first React Native wrapper for Meta's Wearables Device Access Toolkit 1.0 for smart glasses... Meta says experimental features can't be published yet, so you can build for the glasses, you just can't ship.

📝 Live Activities with Expo, End to End

Expo walks through a Live Activity that tracks a receipt from TSX widget to APNs pushes... favourite gotcha: send state in the wrong shape and Apple replies 200 OK, then never updates the activity.

Authored by Luke Farrell and edited by Fran Ríos.

Crease-Proof Layouts, Brain Rot Without the Black Frames, and Un-Breaking a Non-Breaking Release

The React Native Rewind — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0000

You’re reading The React Native Rewind #59.

Hey, I Just Met You? Fold Me Maybe

The world has become a weird place….

Agents now write your code.

Thieves robbed the Louvre in broad daylight with a furniture lift, in under eight minutes…

And the password to the museum's surveillance system was reportedly "LOUVRE".

But none of that is the weirdest news of the year…

Apple has introduced a foldable phone.

The iPhone Duo shipped on October 23rd.

So anytime today, someone can open your app on a 7.6-inch screen with a crease down the middle and fold it halfway like a tiny laptop.

Android devs have lived with this for years…

Now it's everyone's problem.

Like the U2 album Apple put in every iTunes library in 2014.

So how do you build a layout that knows it's been folded?

Thiago Brezinski (@thiagobrez) built react-native-arrangement-view, which is a two-pane layout that rearranges itself as the device folds, unfolds and rotates.

You give it a primary and a secondary pane:

<ArrangementView style={{ flex: 1 }} arrangement="split">
  <ArrangementView.Primary>
    <PrimaryPane />
  </ArrangementView.Primary>
  <ArrangementView.Secondary>
    <SecondaryPane />
  </ArrangementView.Secondary>
</ArrangementView>

So what does that actually look like?

Let's examine the two panes on the iPhone Duo, folding them one at a time.

When the Duo is Closed, it is folded shut and in this case you use the cover screen (that is, the small screen on the outside which you use when the phone is shut).

If you keep it vertical, the height will accommodate two panes, meaning that the main pane will be on top and the other pane will be below.

If you turn it sideways, only one will fit, so you end up with the primary pane.

It's Half-open like a book, and you're holding the Duo as if it were a paperback, so the fold goes from top to bottom.

ArrangementView places the main pane in the left half and the secondary pane in the right half, and includes a small gap on either side of the divider so that nothing ends up in the fold.

You have turned the Duo sideways, Half-open like a laptop, and placed it on a table with one half lying flat and the other elevated, making the crease run side to side.

The panes once more split along the crease, the main pane ending up on the upper half and the secondary pane on the lower half, thus causing neither of them to bend around the fold.

When the Duo is Opened flat and held upright, it forms a single large screen which is wider than it is tall, just like a small tablet.

The crease is now flat, after which ArrangementView ceases to worry about it and places the primary and secondary panes next to one another.

The nice part is that it doesn't invent its own rules.

On iOS it hands the job to SwiftUI's new ArrangementView (iOS 27.1 and up). Android has no equivalent, so it applies Material's adaptive layout rules on top of Jetpack WindowManager.

There's also a useHingeChange hook, which tells you how far open the phone is.

The hinge angle is the angle between the two halves of the screen, so it's 0° when the phone is folded shut and 180° when it's opened flat.

Along with the angle you get a status of closed, partiallyOpen or fullyOpen, and the operating system decides where one ends and the next begins.

You don't need it for layout, because ArrangementView already handles that.

It's for apps that want to behave differently when folded, like a video player that fills the screen when the phone is flat but puts the video on top and the controls underneath when you stand it up like a laptop.

function Player() {
  const { status } = useHingeChange();

  // Stood up like a tiny laptop?
  // Video on top, controls underneath.
  return status === 'partiallyOpen' ? (
    <TabletopPlayer />
  ) : (
    <FullscreenPlayer />
  );
}

So, unlike the U2 album…

react-native-arrangement-view is something you'll actually want in your library.

👉 react-native-arrangement-view

Two Days of React in an Old London Brewery

React Advanced London is back on October 23 & 26, 2026.

The first day is in person at The Brewery, a London venue on the site of an 18th-century brewery, and it's streamed online for everyone who can't make it.

The second day is fully remote, so wherever you are, you still get two days of advanced React engineering.

You'll be joining 700+ engineers for 40+ talks and workshops, given by the library authors and core contributors who build the stuff you ship.

The big topics this year are React Server Components, the React Compiler and AI-assisted development.

And because this is The React Native Rewind, we have to point out there's also a talk on building game UIs in Unreal Engine with React Native.

If the talks don't win you over, the karaoke at the React party might.

👉 Reserve your spot at reactadvanced.com

Never Gonna Show You a Black Frame

In 2024 Oxford selected 'brain rot' as its Word of the Year.

That seems about right for a species which now measures its evenings by vertical videos.

And if you've ever tried to build one of those feeds in React Native…

You'll know the rot works both ways.

If you swipe too quickly then you end up on a black screen.

If you swipe more quickly then two videos will start to talk over each other.

Meanwhile… the phone is still quietly downloading videos that you had already scrolled past.

Rizky Bayu Oktavian (@rbayuokt) set up expo-infinite-media in order to deal with that.

It is a feed in the style of TikTok which is designed for Expo and React Native CLI applications, allowing you to go through the posts one by one by swiping through the videos and photos.

You may ask…

Why not just put a video player in every row of a FlatList?

A FlatList has a number of rows mounted both above and below the screen, and each of the mounted rows has its own video player.

The various video players have no knowledge of one another.

That means that when you're watching one video there will be 10 video players all downloading, buffering and decoding (that is, converting the downloaded file into frames that the screen can display) at the same time, all competing for the same amount of bandwidth and memory.

The start of playback also involves JavaScript.

The FlatList tells the system which row is currently on screen, after which a React effect is carried out, and it is only at that point that the video player begins... so if the JavaScript thread is busy, the video will start late or display a black frame.

expo-infinite-media makes those decisions part of the native code (AVFoundation on iOS, Media3 on Android).

As you scroll the same small number of video players is reused, a preload policy (which specifies which videos should be downloaded in advance*) retrieves the next few videos, and the native code begins playing the video on screen without having to wait for the JavaScript thread.

The video you're currently viewing is loaded fully into the buffer, the next one has its player ready with the first frame already decoded, and the one after that has only about its first 1.5 MB saved to disk.

If you go any further than that, it costs nothing, and the download will be cancelled if you pass a post while it is downloading.

Every post is a plain object with an id, a type and a uri, plus a poster (the still image shown while a video loads) for videos.

const items = [
  {
    id: 'v1',
    type: 'video',
    uri: 'https://cdn.example.com/v1.mp4',
    poster: 'https://cdn.example.com/v1.jpg',
  },
  {
    id: 'p1',
    type: 'image',
    uri: 'https://cdn.example.com/p1.jpg',
  },
];

Then, using it looks a lot like a FlatList:

<InfiniteMediaFeed
  data={posts}
  onEndReached={loadMore}
  renderOverlay={({ item, isActive }) => (
    <Caption item={item} active={isActive} />
  )}
/>

expo-infinite-media needs a development build and the New Architecture...

And version 0.1.0 landed on September 23, so the only thing less stable than the API is your users' attention span.

Nobody waits for a black screen to load...

They swipe to the next video, and now the next video is already playing.

👉 expo-infinite-media

📦 React Native 0.88.0-rc.2

React Native 0.88 is intended to be a non-breaking release, so rc.2 is largely reversing certain changes, for example, the one that prevented some of the TurboModules from compiling in 0.87.

📦 React Navigation 8.0.0-alpha.38

Actions like goBack() now run from the screen that called them, not the focused one... so background screens can stop sending your users to mystery places.

📦 Worklets 0.13.0

Worklets runtimes can now use fetch in Bundle Mode, and Worklets is the fourth library to add Swift Package Manager since we started counting.

📦 React Native Skia 2.13.0

William Candillon (@wcandillon) drops the old architecture in Skia 2.13, so old-architecture apps have officially run out of Skia upgrades.

📦 Re.Pack 5.4.0

Re.Pack now only compiles a platform when its bundle is first requested, so launching iOS no longer means waiting for Android.

📦 EAS CLI 24.8.0

New apps now get an AGENTS.md instead of a CLAUDE.md... sorry, Claude.

📦 agent-device 0.21.15

Michał Pierzchała (@thymikee) shipped seven versions in four days, including an animated iPhone Duo hinge and support for grandma-sized fonts.

📦 Argent 0.26.0

Software Mansion's Argent (lets coding agents tap and swipe in the iOS simulator) now supports foldables too... so robots are folding more iPhone Duos than humans.

📦 Legend List 3.4.0

Jay Meistrich (@jmeistrich), now renders rows ahead in whichever direction you scroll, and chat lists stay pinned to the bottom when the layout changes.

📝 RFC: Secondary JavaScript runtimes in React Native

Tomasz Żelawski (@tjzel) wants React Native to ship an official API for extra Hermes runtimes, instead of every library building its own.

📝 What if your app could fix itself?

Rami Maalouf (@rami__maalouf) built an agent that reproduces a bug on the EAS Simulator, fixes it and opens a PR…

However, you still have to press merge yourself… for now.

Authored by Luke Farrell and edited by Fran Ríos.