React Native architecture in 2025: What’s new and what matters

10 Jul 2025

React Native has evolved significantly since its initial release in 2015. While its core promise—building native mobile apps using JavaScript and React—remains intact, the underlying architecture has undergone a major transformation. In 2025, the React Native ecosystem is more mature, performant, and flexible than ever before, thanks to advances like the React Native New Architecture 2025, improved native interoperability, and evolving state management paradigms.

In this article, we’ll provide a structured overview of the current state of React Native architecture, highlight what’s new as of 2025, and discuss the key architectural considerations that matter for technical leads and mobile architects offering React Native consulting services.

The evolution of React Native architecture

React Native’s original architecture relied heavily on a “bridge” to communicate between the JavaScript and native worlds, passing serialized messages asynchronously. While innovative at the time, this design introduced performance bottlenecks, delayed UI updates, and made high-performance integrations (e.g., animations or native views) challenging.

Over the last few years, Meta (formerly Facebook) and the community introduced a new architecture aimed at solving these issues. In 2025, this architecture is no longer experimental—it’s the default for most modern React Native app development services.

The New Architecture: Key pillars

React Native’s New Architecture revolves around four major components: JSI, TurboModules, Fabric, and Codegen. These components are tightly integrated to build mobile apps with React Native and ensure they’re faster, more flexible, and scalable.

Source: github.com

JSI (JavaScript Interface)

The JavaScript Interface replaces the traditional bridge, allowing direct, synchronous access between JavaScript and C++ code. It enables:

Reduced overhead in data serialization
Tighter integration with native modules
Support for alternative JavaScript engines like Hermes and V8

JSI is the foundation upon which other components of the new architecture are built.

TurboModules

TurboModules leverage JSI to expose native modules more efficiently. Their main benefits include:

Lazy loading of modules (improving startup time)
Synchronous calls when needed (e.g. retrieving system information)
Type safety via Codegen

This results in leaner apps with better startup performance and fewer crashes due to type mismatches.

Fabric

Fabric is the new rendering system in React Native. Unlike the old UI Manager that ran on a separate thread, Fabric renderer in React Native allows:

Concurrent rendering (React 18+ compatible)
Fine-grained scheduling of UI updates
Better prioritization of user interactions

This translates to smoother animations, fewer dropped frames, and a more responsive UI layer.

Codegen

Codegen automatically generates C++ and Java/Kotlin/Objective-C bindings for your TurboModules and native UI components based on TypeScript/Flow definitions. This ensures:

Type-safe communication between JS and native
Reduced manual boilerplate
Fewer runtime errors and better DX (Developer Experience)

Native integration: A first-class experience

The ability to integrate with platform-native features (e.g. Camera, Sensors, Payments) has always been a strength of React Native, but the New Architecture takes this further:

Creating custom native modules is faster and safer thanks to Codegen
Native views are integrated more naturally with Fabric’s rendering system
JSI allows real-time communication between native and JS layers (ideal for apps like games, AR, or IoT dashboards)

This means you no longer need to compromise between code reuse and platform fidelity.

Modern state management strategies

State management in React Native has matured, especially with the widespread adoption of React 18 and Server Components (for web) influencing mobile patterns. During the application design phase, it is important to invest in detailed and in-depth state management planning to avoid unnecessary re-renders.

Key approaches:

Redux for large, enterprise-scale apps with predictable flows
Recoil, Zustand for lightweight, fine-grained reactivity in feature-specific modules
React Context + useReducer for local UI state when minimal boilerplate is needed
React Query / TanStack Query for async data and caching, especially in network-heavy apps

Performance considerations in 2025

Thanks to the New Architecture, React Native apps are now comparable to native apps in many performance-sensitive scenarios. However, performance is still largely a function of how you structure your app.

Key performance recommendations:

Enable the New Architecture (Fabric + TurboModules)
Use Hermes as your JS engine for faster startup and reduced memory usage
Lazy load non-critical modules with TurboModules
Use Reanimated for gesture-heavy apps (seamless with Fabric)
Minimize re-renders by leveraging React.memo, useMemo, and useCallback
Profile with Flipper, React DevTools, and Android Studio for native bottlenecks

Future trends and architectural outlook

Looking ahead, several trends are shaping the architectural thinking around React Native:

Wider Hermes adoption, even across the web (React Native Web + Hermes JavaScript engine in React Native is becoming viable)
Improved TypeScript DX with tighter Codegen integration and native module scaffolding tools
Composable UIs leveraging Server-Driven UI patterns, potentially with GraphQL schema alignment
Monorepos and modularization (Nx, Turborepo) to scale multi-platform apps from a single codebase
AI-assisted developer tooling, like auto-optimizing render trees and detecting anti-patterns at compile time

These trends suggest that React Native will remain not just a tool for cross-platform mobile app development, but a foundational layer for building performant mobile-first experiences at scale.

Conclusion

In 2025, React Native is no longer just an abstraction over native APIs—it is a robust, flexible, and high-performance mobile development framework with an architecture built for scale. With JSI, Fabric, TurboModules, and Codegen forming the core of the New Architecture, developers now have greater control and confidence in building complex, native-feeling applications.

For technical leads and architects, adopting the New Architecture is no longer optional—it’s a strategic necessity. A React Native development agency that embraces these capabilities will be better positioned to build apps that are both delightful to use and maintainable over the long term.