Managing constant React Native upgrades driven by Google/Apple requirements (min SDK, Xcode/iOS SDK, 16KB page size)

[akhan-design]

Hey folks, looking for advice from teams running React Native in production at scale.

Over the last year we’ve been forced into multiple RN upgrades mainly because of platform policy/requirement changes:

Android minimum requirements pushed us to upgrade to RN 0.74.

Now we’re seeing Apple/Xcode iOS SDK minimums with an April 2026 deadline (forcing another upgrade cycle).

And recently Google introduced the 16KB memory / page size requirement, which from what I’m hearing effectively means RN 0.77+ (or at least newer toolchain + fixes), which becomes another upgrade shortly after the last one.

As Head of IT, the hard part isn’t the upgrade itself, it’s the constant unplanned upgrade cadence and resource churn: we upgrade, stabilize, then 3–4 months later we’re forced into the next one. It’s getting difficult to schedule and staff while still delivering product work.

**Questions

1. How are you handling this operationally?**
   • Do you run a rolling RN upgrade program (e.g., quarterly) instead of ad-hoc upgrades?
   • Do you allocate a fixed “platform compliance” budget/squad?
   • Any strategies for minimizing regression risk (e2e coverage, upgrade playbooks, dependency policies)?

2. Why are these changes so aggressive lately?

• Not looking for complaints, just trying to understand the underlying drivers (security, performance, architecture/toolchain changes, ecosystem shifts).

3. For the 16KB memory/page size requirement: is there any viable mitigation on RN 0.74?
Specifically:

• Is there a patch/workaround to stay on 0.74 temporarily (toolchain flags, NDK changes, build config, selective backports)?
• We have native dependencies like Realm and others, so an immediate RN major bump isn’t trivial.

If anyone has been through this recently, I’d really appreciate concrete guidance: what worked, what didn’t, and how you plan upgrades so they’re not constant fire drills.

Thanks!

[wootra]

I have the same issue in my team. We have small team, and did not even finish development for the user features, but this upgrade work consumes all of our capacity. everytime we upgrade this modules, we should go to regression test again, which will consume 1-2 sprint, which makes almost impossible to make any valuable progress.
Because of these, we realized that using a lot of 3rd party libraries that is not directly relative to the community potentially is a huge risk and inevitably need to convert to expo based libraries assuming at least expo-XX libraries would support these latest upgrades. But still sounds unfair.. I am worried this kind of aggressive upgrade will kill all valuable react-native community.