software-mansion/react-native-gesture-handler

React Native is a tool for building mobile apps using JavaScript and React. One persistent challenge in this kind of app development is handling touch input: taps, swipes, and other interactions with the screen. By default, React Native manages these through its own JavaScript responder system, which runs on a background thread. That can make gesture recognition feel slow or unpredictable, especially when the app is busy doing other work at the same time. React Native Gesture Handler replaces this default system with one that runs directly on the device's native UI thread, meaning Android or iOS handles the gesture recognition itself rather than delegating it to JavaScript. According to the README, this makes touch interactions not only smooth but also dependable and deterministic, two qualities that are hard to guarantee when gesture tracking runs through a JavaScript layer. The library exposes a declarative API, so developers describe what they want to happen rather than writing step-by-step event handlers. Gestures are no longer routed through the JavaScript responder system at all, they are tracked at the platform level from start to finish. The project is maintained by Software Mansion with support from Shopify and Expo. It supports the three most recent minor versions of React Native. Version 3 requires React Native 0.82 or newer. Version 2 supports a much wider range of older releases going back to React Native 0.63, and a full compatibility table is in the official documentation. There is an example project included in the repository that developers can run on a connected Android or iOS device or emulator to try the API before integrating it into a real project. The library is open source under the MIT License.