React Native Connection 2025 - Lucie Uffoltz & Antoine Thibierge - Quest for the Perfect Color

Find more talks of our conferences and meetups on 👉 https://async.techconnection.io/ 👈. The world of mobile development is ever-evolving, and color rendering is no exception. Historically, React Native has supported the RGB color space, which, while ubiquitous, is rooted in the technical constraints of cathode ray tubes rather than human perception. This talk explores our journey to integrate the OkLab color space into React Native—a perceptual color model that aligns more closely with how humans see and process colors, which is already an adopted standard used in Photoshop and new browsers (CSS4). We'll delve into the shortcomings of RGB, highlight the advantages of OkLab for achieving smoother gradients, predictable lightness, and color manipulation, and demonstrate how this upgrade allows developers to write color logic that is intuitive and portable across devices and platforms. Join us to see how our project has evolved over the past year, from technical research to practical implementation. We will details our story, the iteration between theory and experience, the balance between performance and conformity of the algorithm and finally the process of proposing this to an open source project. Whether you're a React Native veteran or a color enthusiast, come to see how OkLab is paving the way for a more vibrant and perceptually accurate color experience in React Native."