You Don’t Need a Rewrite, You Need React Native Brownfield | React Universe On Air Coffee Talk #27

Is rewriting your native app really the only way to go cross-platform? In this Coffee Talk episode, we explore how React Native Brownfield offers a smarter path forward. Łukasz Chludziński invites Oskar Kwaśniewski and Burak Güner—who work directly on React Native Core and brownfield tooling—to discuss how recent advances in React Native have made brownfield integration far more viable, stable, and scalable. You’ll learn: ➡️ Why brownfield isn’t what it used to be (goodbye, brittle bridging) ➡️ How `RootViewFactory` and `ReactNativeFactory` APIs simplify setup ➡️ What’s new in React Native Brownfield 1.0.0 ➡️ How to keep your architecture clean while integrating React Native ➡️ What this means for modern native stacks like SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, and future-facing platforms like visionOS Whether you’re maintaining a legacy app or building for what's next, this episode gives you a blueprint for hybrid success. Explore React Native Brownfield 🙌 https://github.com/callstack/react-native-brownfield Check out episode resources on our website 📚 https://bit.ly/3ESW3Lf Catch more React Universe On Air episodes 🎧 https://bit.ly/44A0q8q Get your React Universe Conf 2025 tickets 🎟 https://hubs.li/Q03l-47N0 Sign up for our newsletter ✉️ https://bit.ly/3H2xsE6 Follow us on X 🐦 https://x.com/callstackio Chapters 00:00 Welcome to the React Universe 02:00 Meet our guests: Oskar & Burak 02:50 Let’s talk brownfield app development 03:37 Craziest brownfield setups our guests have seen 08:19 Greenfield vs. brownfield React Native 14:14 How we used to approach brownfield development 18:20 Callstack’s React Native Brownfield 23:30 RootView Factory & React Native Factory 28:50 New Features in React Native Brownfield 1.0 35:35 Sharing data between native and JavaScript 41:00 How about using different React Native versions 43:30 Cost of complexity 47:00 Learn more and get in touch with our guests