React Native Radio RNR 356 - How Vercel Built the v0 App with React Native
Mar 16, 2026
Fernando Rojo, Head of Mobile at Vercel and creator of Solito, explains building V0 with React Native and Expo. He discusses choosing a tech stack, tradeoffs between React Native and SwiftUI, and upstreaming fixes to improve native tooling. The conversation covers performance tuning, shared web-mobile code strategies, and contributions to open source libraries.
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Prototype Multiple Stacks Before Committing
- Evaluate native, SwiftUI, and React Native with prototypes and choose the stack that balances iteration speed and escape hatches to native code.
- Fernando chose Expo + React Native but kept willingness to write native modules and even maintained a temporary RN fork.
React Native Offers Better Escape Hatches
- SwiftUI felt productive but had worse escape hatches than React Native for low-level fixes, making RN more flexible for deep native adjustments.
- Fernando noted RN maps to UIKit and lets teams drop into native when performance or polish demands it.
Hands-On With Key Third-Party Libraries
- V0 uses Unistyles for styling, Reanimated for animations, Zgo for menus, and a SwiftUI rewrite of PagerView to fix a UIKit scroll reporting bug.
- Fernando worked with CallStack to rewrite PagerView in SwiftUI and upstream the change instead of shipping a fork.