What Changed?

• Old Architecture: React Native used a bridge to communicate between JavaScript and native code, which introduced performance bottlenecks and complexity.
• New Architecture: The new system (Fabric & TurboModules) enables direct, synchronous communication and improved performance. The bridge is no longer a bottleneck.

If you haven’t already then check out the offical blog post from 2024

Why Does This Matter?

• Better Performance: UI updates and native calls are faster and smoother.
• Simpler Mental Model: Developers don’t need to worry about async bridge calls or serialization.
• Modern APIs: New features and libraries are built for the new architecture, not the bridge.

Stop Writing About the Bridge!

If you’re writing about React Native in 2025, focus on the new architecture. The bridge is legacy. Tutorials, docs, and blog posts should help developers adopt the latest best practices.

What to Write About Instead

• How to migrate to the new architecture
• Using Fabric and TurboModules
• Performance improvements and new APIs

React Native has evolved. Let’s help the community move forward by leaving the bridge in the past.

Thoughts on the new React Native architecture? Reach out to me on LinkedIn to discuss!

1. Initial Prompt:

Create a new React Native app in folder <folder>:

It should use the latest React Native version with new architecture enabled and latest Expo version. The app should be written following the best practices. Code should be maintainable and also be kept simple. Avoid adding excessive third party dependencies.

Functionality:

Show a simple screen with an input text field and a button. If button clicked the text should show “Hello <textFieldInput>”

Unit test to verify functionality. (can use jest library if needed)

Material UI style

Result: It created a new empty project with dependencies added, but without the Hello World functionality. It wanted me to manually open the project in VS Code first before proceeding.

2. Second Attempt:

I repeated the first prompt to nudge it to actually add the required Hello World functionality.

Result: Functionality was actually added (Yay!) and looked pretty decent. Code itself was ok.

However, unit tests were broken and didn’t compile due to import errors.

Screenshot of the React Native app created by GPT-5

3. Fix the Tests:

Ensure unit tests are succeeding and valuable

Result: Missing dependencies and imports got fixed and unit tests actually succeed.

Overall Impression:

• GPT-5 seems to be a bit lazy. Misses details like unit tests not working (which makes it kinda human-like 🙃) & insists on human interaction to open the project before actually completing requirements 🫠

• GPT-5 is a bit shy with sharing its thought process and communicating why file changes are going to be done etc. (Completely different to how Claude Sonnet 4 works, Claude is so much chattier). Even prompting it to share its thought process results in GPT bowing out (“I can’t share my internal chain-of-thought, but here’s a concise summary of what I’ll do: …”)

• Decent UI style, which came pretty close to what I had in mind

• Overall lots of hand-holding required to get a simple Hello World app running. Not really AGI for me.

What are your experiences with GPT-5? Have you noticed similar patterns in its behavior? Let me know your thoughts on LinkedIn!

let message: string = 'Hello, World!';
console.log(message);

Meanwhile, you can find me on LinkedIn