This week’s livestream was packed with exciting updates in the React and React Native ecosystem. Our spotlight was on Rozenite, the new DevTools framework from Callstack, plus we covered a wave of new releases, performance boosts, and AI capabilities coming to React Native apps.

Rozenite: Custom DevTools for React Native

Szymon Chmal has introduced Rozenite, a framework that makes custom DevTools plugins a first-class citizen in React Native.

Why this matters:

• Build app-specific debugging tools, internal dashboards, or performance monitors without hacking DevTools internals
• Ships with 4 plugins out of the box: Network, TanStack Query, Redux, and Expo Atlas
• Speeds up development and gives teams full control over their debugging experience

Rozenite was born from real-world needs at Callstack and has the potential to change how teams monitor and debug React Native apps at scale.

Other React Native ecosystem updates

• Precompiled React Native for iOS (0.81): Build times are about to get a massive speed boost. Early results show:
  • 10x faster builds on RNTester
  • Expo 54 will enable this by default, and library authors are encouraged to ship prebuilt binaries for even faster CI/CD.
    
• On-Device Text Embeddings in React Native: Use Apple’s NLP framework to generate text embeddings directly on-device:
  • Local, privacy-friendly ML
  • Great for search, recommendations, and offline AI features
    
• TanStack DB 0.1: A new embedded client-side database designed to pair seamlessly with TanStack Query, giving frontend apps SQL-like persistence with familiar dev ergonomics.
  
• React Core PR: “Throw a Promise” Deprecation: The underlying pattern used by react-freeze is being phased out, reflecting the ongoing evolution of React Suspense internals.
  

Catch the full replay for live demos and our breakdown of what these updates mean for real-world React Native apps!