Reanimated already sits at the center of serious animation work in React Native. In this interview, Bartłomiej Błoniarz (Software Mansion) talks about what comes next.

A big part of that work is moving closer to the native primitives of each platform. On iOS, that means Core Animation and the threading model around it, including the render server that can take animation work off the main app flow. The goal is better performance without forcing developers to give up the flexibility that made Reanimated useful in the first place.

That shift also connects to the newer CSS-style API in Reanimated. Bartłomiej explains it as a more familiar structure for developers coming from the web, where many examples translate almost directly into the Reanimated API. At the same time, the worklets model stays in place for cases where developers need more control and want to run arbitrary JavaScript on the UI runtime.

The harder edge of the conversation is around shared element transitions. That is still one of the trickiest problems in this space because it pushes against the usual rules of how views are structured and moved. Bartłomiej gets into why this is difficult, how Reanimated approaches it differently from web view transitions, and why cases like video make the problem even more demanding.

He also points to a less flashy but equally important part of the roadmap: stability. Much of the recent pain came from the New Architecture transition and the time it took for the ecosystem to catch up. That gap is closing now, and the work with Meta is meant to make Reanimated more stable as React Native itself keeps changing.