Started using React Native two days ago and immediately... fell down a tab-bar rabbit hole. I’d seen Instagram and Revolut collapse their tab bars on scroll while keeping every icon visible. I wanted that without giving up real iOS Liquid Glass. Turns out iOS 26’s public API can’t express that state. UITabBarMinimizeBehavior is an enum of when, not what. With onScrollDown, UIKit minimizes the bar to the active tab alone. There’s no parameter controlling what survives. So most implementations rebuild the visible bar as a custom component. Some use genuine glass materials, but the real UITabBar is gone and with it, the native selection capsule: that little blob that moves like a drop of water between tabs. You can reproduce it with separate springs on the leading and trailing edges. I didn’t want a reproduction. I wanted UIKit’s. Then I remembered a Flutter app i built some months back which uses cupertino_native. Flutter runs the app while a platform-view bridge renders a real UIKit UITabBar. Finding expo-glass-tabs clarified the compact geometry I wanted. The two ideas clicked: why not bridge a real UITabBar into React Native? Here’s the trick: a standalone UITabBar has no UITabBarController managing it, so Apple’s minimization rule never applies. That means I can control its frame and items myself. Expo Router still owns navigation and screen lifecycle. React Native detects scroll direction. Swift removes and restores the real item labels, recentres the icons and animates the native bar’s size. All five icons remain visible. The result keeps Apple’s Liquid Glass, water-drop capsule, hit testing and accessibility, while adding a compact state its public API doesn’t provide. One gotcha tho: detaching the bar means reimplementing everything the controller previously gave you for free. Active-tab reselect scrolling was one exampleshow more

Swapped our custom tab bar for Apple's real iOS... 26 Liquid Glass, fully native, not a React Native re-creation… Powered by Expo Router's native tabs, this renders through UIKit itself, so it gets the actual system blur, materials, and scroll behavior straight from the OS… Scroll down and watch the bar shrink into just the active icon…show more

Introducing (React) Native Bottom Tabs! 🎉 First Bottom Tab... Navigator using Native Platform primitives for both Android and iOS. The API surface is almost a drop-in replacement for JS Bottom Tabs! ➡ `npm i react-native-bottom-tabs`show more

Flutter devs can now build with real native Liquid... Glass without writing Swift. I built real_liquid_glass to bring Apple’s native glass effects directly into Flutter. Try it:show more

Inspired by the Telegram’s iOS 26 Animated Tab Bar... ✌️ I just traversed through the tab bar to find the associated Image views and simply added SF Symbol Effects to them, and it just works perfectly fine. NOTE: This is a native tab view with a tab bar.show more

Instagram has added a Liquid Glass tab bar, but... it doesn’t fully match the iOS 26 experience.show more

iOS 27 makes the Liquid Glass tab bar look... more like real glass.show more

Hey React Native devs 👋 I recently built a... very cool app with React Native Expo—it’s amazing how powerful and easy it is! 🚀 Everything you can do with React Native CLI, you can do with Expo too. If you haven’t tried it yet, now’s the time! #buildinpublic Expo React Nativeshow more

Brought this idea into React Native Video + Liquid... Glass + a draggable play button Should I drop the code? 👇 #expo #reactnativeshow more

Some days after the Lagos Life launched, I started... thinking “what would building a native app for Lagos Life look like?” So, I decided to try it out using Expo, React Native Skia v3 and react-native-webgpu by William Candillon. The app runs smoothly at 60fps. I will be sharing an article soon. Big shout out to Shalom Rayhamen and the entire Lagos Life team! Demo👇🏽show more

Here are two Liquid Glass effects: one made with... React Native and the other with SwiftUI. Can you tell which is which? 👀show more

Week 13 of showing what you can do with... Expo & WebGPU: Remember the OG iBeer app? I brought it back with real physics and liquid shaders in React Native 🍻 Code below as always 👇show more

Expo Router v6 is here! The perfect blend of... React APIs and Native views. ✦ Liquid glass tabs for all  Apple devices ✦ Native material tabs for Android ✦ link previews and context menus ✦ Server-side middleware for authorization ✦ Beautiful web modalsshow more

Recreated Apple’s Photos app entirely in HTML as part... of my Apple DNA project. The focus was on technical fidelity: Liquid Glass, real-time blur and refraction, animations, gesture physics, transitions, navigation, and pixel-level accuracy. The goal is to reverse-engineer every native iOS app until the HTML reconstruction is nearly indistinguishable from the original. Each reconstruction contributes to a reusable web design system with customizable tokens, components, and native-like interactions.show more

Man, the native development tooling is so bad. Why... does the preview has to reload every time I switch tabs? Am I missing a setting that keeps it open and preserves the state?show more

Let's make Android development in React Native great and... fun again. This is the official native Material 3 carousel composable rendered using Expo native views. The result is a simple-to-use React component with all native behavior (gestures and transitions) built in.show more

Native iOS split view is coming to React Navigation... 🔜 Powered by React Native Screens 🫶 Let us know your use cases so we can test and ensure that the API is suitable for a wide range of usage 👇show more

TikTok just updated its tab bar with Liquid Glass,... and it looks a lot like Instagram’s.show more

Over a year ago, I published one of the... first true Liquid Glass packages for #Flutter. it had some memory problems, and the look was also not close enough to the real thing. Today I'm shipping the first prerelease of 1.0.0 and what will hopefully make it into cupertino_ui 🧵show more