0.76 made the New Architecture the default for new projects in October 2024. What's happened in the releases since is the unglamorous but important part: turning "the default for new projects" into "the only architecture that exists." As of 0.86, that work is essentially done, and the release cadence since has moved on to things a New-Architecture-only runtime makes possible — a new animation backend, a faster JS engine as the only JS engine, and a governance change bigger than any single API.
#The Legacy Architecture is gone, not just deprecated
The timeline is worth having straight, because "New Architecture" stopped meaning one thing partway through it. 0.80 (June 2025) officially froze the Legacy Architecture — no more bug fixes, no more updates, just a countdown. 0.82 (October 2025) was the first release that runs entirely on the New Architecture, with Legacy Architecture code removal underway in the repo itself. By 0.84 (February 2026), the Legacy Architecture's components are removed from core outright. If you're upgrading a long-lived app that never migrated, this is the wall you hit — there is no bridge to fall back to anymore.
#Hermes V1 becomes mandatory, JSC exits core
0.81 (August 2025) moved JavaScriptCore support out of core and into a community-maintained package — still usable, but no longer the team's problem to ship. 0.84 then makes Hermes V1 the default engine outright. Under a New-Architecture-only runtime, this isn't really a JS engine preference anymore: JSI depends on capabilities only Hermes provides, so Hermes stops being a recommendation and becomes a structural requirement.
#Precompiled iOS builds, by default
Experimental precompiled iOS dependencies showed up as early as 0.80, and by 0.84 precompiled iOS binaries are the default. If your iOS build times have been dominated by compiling React Native itself from source on every clean build, this is the release where that stops being normal.
#A genuine stability streak
0.83 (December 2025) was the first release with zero user-facing breaking changes, and 0.86 (June 2026) repeated it. That's notable on its own terms: for most of React Native's history, "no breaking changes" wasn't a thing a release note bothered to call out because it wasn't true often enough to be worth bragging about.
#React Native leaves the phone, and Meta hands off governance
React Conf 2025 brought official React Native support for Meta Quest — the framework's first real move beyond phone and tablet form factors. Separately, and arguably more consequential long-term: in October 2025, Meta announced it's donating React, React Native, and JSX to a new React Foundation under the Linux Foundation. That's a governance change, not a code change, but it changes who you're betting on when you bet on React Native.
#Animation and DevTools keep iterating
0.85 (April 2026) shipped a new animation backend; 0.86 (June 2026) added edge-to-edge support for Android 15+ and continued DevTools improvements. Neither is architecturally significant the way 0.76 or 0.84 were — this is what a mature release cadence looks like once the big rewrite is behind you.
#What to adopt first
- If you're still on the Legacy Architecture, stop treating New Architecture migration as optional — 0.84 removed the fallback, and every release past it assumes you're not on it.
- Audit for any direct JavaScriptCore dependency now, not when you upgrade — it's a community package, not a core guarantee, and Hermes V1 is where the performance and JSI work is actually landing.
- Re-benchmark iOS clean-build times after upgrading past 0.84; precompiled binaries by default is a real, un-opt-in-required win.
- Don't treat the "no breaking changes" releases as a reason to stop reading release notes — they're the exception, not the new baseline, and the next major shift will come with less warning than 0.76 gave you.
- If you're evaluating React Native today, evaluate it as a foundation-governed project, not a Meta-only one — that changes some long-term-risk conversations, for better or worse, and it's worth having explicitly rather than assuming the old ownership model still applies.