// the find
wix/react-native-navigation
A complete native navigation solution for React Native
React Native Navigation is Wix's native navigation library for React Native, using actual platform navigation controllers (UINavigationController on iOS, Activity/Fragment on Android) rather than JS-driven views. It's for teams building production React Native apps who want navigation that actually feels native, not simulated. Actively maintained with CI against RN 77, 78, 84, and 85.
100% native navigation stack means transitions, gestures, and back-button behavior match platform conventions without JavaScript overhead. The options system is thorough — shared element transitions, custom animations with spring interpolators, per-screen status bar control, side menus, overlays, all configurable from JS. CI matrix covering four RN versions simultaneously is genuinely impressive for a community library and means you're unlikely to get stranded on an RN upgrade. The separation of concerns in the Android implementation (ViewController, ParentController, LayoutFactory) makes the native side easier to reason about than most RN native modules.
Installation still requires manual native file edits — this is unavoidable given the approach, but it's friction and the first thing that trips up new adopters, especially on monorepos or managed Expo workflows (it's incompatible with Expo Go). The primary language reported as MDX is a lie — the actual codebase is Kotlin/Java/ObjC/Swift/TypeScript; this reflects docs being the bulk of the repo by file count, which means GitHub's language detection is misleading and could signal docs-heavy but implementation-thin (though that's not actually the case here). Deep link handling is weaker than React Navigation's — you get the primitives but wiring up universal links with full state restoration requires more manual work. The mixed Java/Kotlin Android codebase shows its age; some core files like NavigationActivity.java haven't been migrated and the inconsistency creates friction when debugging native issues.