React Native 0.57 released with major improvements in accessibility APIs, WKWebView-backed implementation, and more!

With 600 commits and 992 files changed, React Native 0.57 was released yesterday. In this release, major improvements are done in the accessibility APIs, and WKWebView-backed implementation is added just as they announced in August, along with several tooling updates.

What is new in React Native 0.57?

New features

• Accessibility APIs, used for making apps accessible to people with disabilities, now support accessibility hints, inverted colors, and easier usage of defining the element's role and states.
• On iOS, WebView can now use WKWebView internally by passing useWebKit={true}.
• Loosen platform check to improve support for out-of-tree platforms.
• An implementation of YogaNodeProperties is added, which accesses style and layout properties using a ByteBuffer rather than JNI calls.
• FlatList and SectionList are now added to Animated exports.

Changes

• Android tooling has been updated to match newer configuration requirements (SDK 27, gradle 4.4, and support library 27)
• unbundle is renamed to ram-bundle (a breaking change for OSS)
• Minimum Node version is changed from 8 to 8.3
• Flow is upgraded to v0.76.0
• ESLint is upgraded to 5.1.0
• Babel is upgraded to v7.0.0
• The “loading from pre-bundled file” notification won’t show up anymore when not on dev mode
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• StyleSheet.compose is refined so that subtypes of DangerouslyImpreciseStyleProp can flow through the function call without losing their type
• The use of new Metro configuration is supported in the public react-native CLI
• react-native-dom is whitelisted in haste/cli config defaults

Bug fixes

• debugger-ui path of react-native CLI was wrong earlier, which is now fixed.
• Extreme slowness of <TextInput> is fixed
• Placeholder of TextInput not completely visible on Android is fixed
• Horizontal <ScrollView> overflow issue is fixed
• Added support for connecting to the Packager when running the iOS app on device when using custom Debug configuration
• Fix crash in RCTImagePicker on iOS

Removed features

• ScrollView.propTypes is removed. It is recommended to use flow or typescript for verifying correct prop usage instead. (Breaking change)
• ReactInstancePackage is now deprecated. It is recommended to use @link ReactPackage or @link LazyReactPackage.

To know more about the improvements in React Native 0.57 release, head over to their GitHub repository.

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