React Native often feels familiar to web engineers at first: components, hooks, TypeScript, state management, and reusable UI patterns all look close enough to home. But once teams start shipping real mobile apps, the differences become impossible to ignore. Navigation behaves differently, lifecycle matters more, releases are slower, permissions are sensitive, offline states appear sooner than expected, and App Store and Play Store rules change the way teams think about shipping.

This roundtable is for developers who have made that transition, or are making it now, to compare what transferred well, what caused trouble, and which assumptions had to change. Bring your stories, surprises, and hard-earned lessons from building React Native apps in the real world.

React Native’s New Architecture is often explained with big words: Fabric, TurboModules, JSI, Hermes, concurrent rendering, synchronous layout, codegen. For many app developers, that can make the topic feel like something only native-module authors or C++ engineers need to understand.

This talk takes the opposite approach. It explains the New Architecture from the point of view of an application developer who wants to ship better React Native apps, make better technical decisions, and avoid misunderstanding where performance problems actually come from.

We will look at what the old bridge did, why it became a limitation, what JSI changes, how TurboModules affect native module access, what Fabric changes in rendering, and where Hermes fits into the runtime story. The goal is not to turn every React Native developer into a native internals expert. The goal is to give app developers a practical mental model so they know what matters, what does not, and when they need to care.