Intro

It is been a while since I am maintaining the react-native-pager-view. Previously it was part of the RN core, but then it has been extracted into a separate package. It has used 2 versions of ViewPager (v1, v2) and UIPageView. I tried to fix all issues, but some of them required some workarounds that were not stable enough. Those workarounds created other issues, hence other workarounds were used to fix that. To be honest, I was a little bit exhausted from it, hence together with @krozniata and @okwasniewski decided to build those components from the scratch

Next branch

@alpha0010 did a great job by implementing the LazyViewPager component. We released his changes into the next branch and we had the plan to merge it into the main branch. But we did some internal tests on real applications and in some cases, it did not work well. Internally we used another workaround to achieve the lazy effect. Moreover, we did not want to add additional complexity, when it did not bring more benefits and would add additional bugs to fix. With new architecture implementing a lazy approach should be much easier. Unfortunately, we won’t merge the next branch into the main. We will implement a lazy approach using a new architecture. If you would like to maintain LazyViewPager, feel free to make a fork

New architecture support

Meta has released a new architecture called fabric. In this library, we would like to focus first on the new architecture. After that, we will evaluate, if it would be worth migrating a new solution to the old arch (Right now it is hard to estimate it based on a priori knowledge)

Motivation

We would like to have more control over native components to easily fix issues or add new features. Right now, those components are black boxes, which are hard to maintain. Moreover, UIPageViewController is not maintained anymore and is not used in the iOS world. Unfortunately, we cannot use UICollectionView, because it does not work well in the RN world.

The same thing refers RecyclerView component for Android. The currently used ViewPager2 component on Android brought more issues than benefits since it uses the earlier-mentioned RecyclerView.