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React Navigation joins GitHub Sponsors

ยท 4 min read
Brent Vatne

tl;dr: We joined GitHub Sponsors, click here to see our sponsors page and become a sponsor!


React Navigation is depended on by some of the most respected engineering organizations, well-known brands, and talented startups. It's used by financial services apps like Brex and Coinbase Pro; educational apps like Codecademy Go and DataCamp; consumer apps like Shop from Shopify, Bloomberg, TaskRabbit, and Th3rdwave; entertainment apps like the National Football League (NFL) (in their main app and several others), Cameo, Tracker Network for Fortnite, and the Call of Duty companion app from Activision Blizzard. One of my personal favourite apps using React Navigation is Readwise, I love making my coffee with Single Origin 2, and managing household chores with Sweepy.

We've also seen React Navigation used in apps that help in the fight against COVID-19. Our favourites are How We Feel by Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann and a team from Pinterest in collaboration with leading scientists (article) and COVID Symptom Study by ZOE Global in association with King's College London (article).

There are so many more apps that we could mention here, but let's move on. If you've been following along with React Navigation, you already know what a huge improvement v5 has been for the library and for navigation in React Native in general. We haven't slowed down since shipping v5, some other substantial improvements we've shipped recently include:

  • First-class support for web ๐ŸŽ‰
  • The improvements to URL integration that made web support possible also drastically improves the experience of building deep linking in your iOS and Android apps! You can play around with route configuration directly in the browser with the linking playground.
  • An alternative stack navigator implementation that uses UINavigationController on iOS and Fragment on Android. There is no beating the performance of the native stack navigator equivalents (at least for now), and so we made them available through createNativeStackNavigator on react-native-screens. You don't get the same degree of customization with the native stacks, and there is no equivalent on web, so there are plenty of cases where you will still want to use createStackNavigator. Your app, your choice. Mix and match if you want.

React Navigation Teamโ€‹

This project has only been possible because of the time and money invested by Expo and Software Mansion to support contributors like the current lead maintainer Satyajit Sahoo and others such as Brent, Eric, Evan, Krzysztof, and Wojciech.

Many folks from the community have also volunteered their valuable time to the project: Michal Osadnik was instrumental in designing and building React Navigation v5, Erivelton has provided support and improved the documentation, Vojtech maintains popular React Navigation utility libraries and chips in on the library and documentation when he has time, and Janic regularly lives on the bleeding edge, testing new features and helping us improve them before they are included in stable releases and maintaining react-native-safe-area-context, one of the building blocks for React Navigation.

@react-navigation/core has reached over 300,000 downloads per week on npm, compared to 380,000+ for react-native. It's not possible to draw any meaningful conclusions from npm download stats alone, but it is humbling to see React Navigation at nearly 80% of the weekly download count of React Native. We've managed this with an incredibly small team of, at most, one and a half full time engineers at any given time, and volunteers that chip in when they can.

Sponsorshipโ€‹

To be blunt: if React Navigation helps you to deliver value to your customers, we would be thrilled if you could show us some love through a sponsorship.

Sponsorships will help us to move more quickly towards our goal of building the best cross-platform navigation library and continue to provide timely support for bug reports in our GitHub issues.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Visit our GitHub Sponsors page ๐Ÿ‘ˆโ€‹

We appreciate any support you can provide, but please only donate if you have the financial means to do so comfortably!