// the find
software-mansion/react-native-screens
Native navigation primitives for your React Native app.
react-native-screens exposes native navigation containers (UINavigationController on iOS, Fragments on Android) to React Native, replacing plain JS Views in navigation stacks. It's the performance layer underneath react-navigation — you almost certainly already depend on it transitively. Direct use is for navigation library authors; everyone else gets the benefit automatically.
Active maintenance from Software Mansion with daily commits and a proper Detox e2e test suite covering both iOS and Android. Full Fabric (new architecture) support since RN 0.76, with Paper support deliberately dropped in 4.25 — they're not trying to carry dead weight forever. The react-freeze integration is a genuine win: suspending off-screen component trees without unmounting them cuts re-render overhead on tab switches noticeably. Platform coverage is unusually broad: iOS, Android, tvOS, visionOS, Windows, and web all ship in one package.
The Android setup requires manually patching MainActivity to override onCreate with a custom FragmentFactory — this is a footgun that auto-linking doesn't handle, and the README buries it mid-page. The known-issues table is a graveyard of iOS header edge cases (search bars, large titles, RefreshControl) that have been open for years with workarounds but no fixes. Dropping legacy architecture support in 4.25 means any project still on Paper is stuck on an older minor branch with no stated LTS policy. Version coupling to react-native is tight and frequently breaks — the compat table already has six rows just for the 4.x line.