The Future of React Native Graphics: WebGPU, Skia, and Beyond (2025) - Shopify

This post details the integration of WebGPU with React Native Skia, enabling a unified backend architecture (replacing separate OpenGL and Metal implementations) and symmetry with the web ecosystem. It showcases the use of Three.js and React Three Fiber with WebGPU, compute shaders via ComputeToys, and TensorFlow.js for ML workloads. Architectural improvements to React Native Skia's reconciler (moving from mutable SkiaDOM to an immutable fabric reconciler) have resulted in significant performance gains (up to 50% faster on iOS, nearly 200% faster on Android for animation time) and expanded platform support to macOS, tvOS, and Node.js. Skia Graphite, a new Skia backend for modern GPU APIs, is introduced, offering automatic threading and seamless 2D/3D composition.