Expo SDK 55 ships real Compose + SwiftUI cross‑rendering
Expo announced SDK 55, which introduces real Jetpack Compose for Android and SwiftUI for iOS from a single codebase — native rendering and Material Design 3 included announced. This changes the tradeoffs for cross‑platform UI: it’s no longer JS-approximation but native platform renderers, which matters for large shared codebases deciding between single-source DX and native fidelity.
Expo SDK 55 was published Feb 24, 2026 and bundles React Native 0.83 and React 19.2. (expo.dev) Expo’s engineering notes say Jetpack Compose moved from an alpha preview into a beta-capable surface with a usable set of Material Design 3 components for production validation. (expo.dev) The Compose beta was exercised by a full app called WikiReader that the Expo team built to prove gaps and ship specific components including Card, LazyColumn, ListItem, DockedSearchBar, and ModalBottomSheet. (expo.dev) The native UI surface is distributed as the @expo/ui package in Expo’s docs (bundled ~55.0.2 in the docs) and the main expo npm package shows 55.x versions in the registry. (docs.expo.dev) Expo left Expo Go on SDK 54 in the Store for a short transition window and directs iOS developers to TestFlight or the new eas go flow for SDK 55 testing during the migration period. (expo.dev) A GitHub issue repro reported Xcode 15+ Swift Concurrency/MainActor compilation failures in expo-modules-core@55.0.3 for iOS native builds, with reproducible errors posted and discussed on the repo. (github.com) Hermes v1 is available as an opt-in runtime for SDK 55, but Expo warns that enabling Hermes v1 requires building React Native from source and will significantly increase native build times. (expo.dev)
