React Native Enterprise Framework is now Rock

Meet Rock, the new name for what you’ve known as the React Native Enterprise Framework (RNEF).

Same framework. Same team. Same mission. But now with a name that won’t trip over itself every time React Native gets a new definition.

This is more than a new coat of paint. Rock reflects where we’re headed: building a solid foundation for enterprise-grade, cross-platform development, no matter where React Native or React can run. It’s also the start of something bigger: a place where the best tools we at Callstack (and the community) create can live together under one roof.

Or… one rock.

How to use Rock

We’ve added an easy way to try Rock in seconds in your existing React Native Community CLI and RNEF projects with our new command:

npm create rock

It does most of the work for you. In a few seconds, you’ll have a ready-to-run Rock project with current React Native configuration adjusted to Rock.

Although initialization should work in most of the projects, chances are you have more exotic setup. In such cases, you can refer to manual instructions and continue with the migration.

What people are saying

Rock is fairly new on the React Native scene, yet we already see some positive adoption from large projects, such as Expensify, Uniswap, or Rainbow (and a few others that we can’t disclose), cutting down on their CI workloads by up to 96% and driving costs down by 10x.

We've been really happy with Rock. It's saved us a significant amount of time in our CI pipeline. One thing it's going to enable for us is doing our QA locally before merging PRs instead of needing to wait on PRs to merge and deploy test builds. The build cache makes that process feasible.
— Anonymous, Director of Mobile Engineering

Rock has been the most impactful collaboration enabler I've encountered for mobile development teams that value integration. Thanks to remote cache, the team spends way less time on environment-specific build failures.
— Adam Horodyski, Tech Lead at Expensify

Built to last

With Rock, we’re leaning into what enterprises value most: stability, reliability, and longevity, all while giving them tools to dramatically speed up project and feature delivery. Like any good foundation, Rock is designed to support massive projects without getting in the way. And it’s built to grow. Today it powers React Native iOS and Android apps, in greenfield and brownfield setups; tomorrow it will support even more platforms around TV and desktop.

Our mineral-inspired ecosystem is just beginning, as we’re working on a variety of tools which we’ll be integrating with Rock for a solid experience:

• Rozenite: plugin framework for React Native DevTools bringing your favorite web extensions, such as Redux, TanStack Query, and more, like network activity, to React Native
• Ottrelite: native performance instrumentation that works seamlessly with OpenTelemetry (coming soon, learn more from Artur and Domink’s talk at React Universe Conf)

More “rocks” are in the pipeline.

How to migrate from RNEF project

The npm create rock command will work in both React Native Community CLI and RNEF projects. Just type it and get on the new thing in no time.

The command will handle migrating the local build cache, but we can’t change the one you store remotely (e.g. on GitHub or S3). Upgrade callstackincubator/ios and callstackincubator/android GitHub actions to v3 to use Rock instead of RNEF and regenerate the cache for the new builds.

Bonus: Install iOS apps from a link

At first we planned for this release to be only about the rename. But we couldn’t resist sneaking in a feature that we hope you and your app testers will find useful. We’ve enhanced our GitHub actions to include ad-hoc iOS releases.

Just set ad-hoc: true and our comment bot will present you with a link to your signed iOS binary for testing.

We love this feature for smaller projects that want to quickly get going with sharing device builds across testers and developers. Give it a try and let us know if it’s helpful.

Same team, bigger playground

Finally, Rock is also our way at Callstack to bring our R&D ideas to life safely at scale. Ideas that might be too experimental for the React Native Community CLI.

Whether you’ve been with us since the RNEF days or are just meeting us for the first time: welcome! Let’s build something that lasts, while making your experience writing cross platform apps with React Native delightful.

Visit our docs, follow @rockjs_dev on X, and don’t forget to star the project on GitHub ⭐