Community Check-in: Future development roadmap and how we can help

[AbhinayMe]

Hey everyone, and a huge thanks to the maintainers for all the hard work on React Native Paper over the years. Special thanks to @satya164 for the recent releases and keeping things moving. It’s been a staple in my projects and an absolute lifesaver for Material Design in RN.

I’m opening this discussion just to get a pulse on the current state of the library. A few of us in the community have noticed that development and merge activity seems to have slowed down significantly over the past year.

As a developer heavily relying on RNP, I totally understand that open-source is often a labor of love and maintainers get busy with life, work, and other priorities. However, before committing to it for new, long-term projects, it would be incredibly helpful to know what the future holds.

A few things I'd love to know:

1. Is there a general roadmap or vision for the upcoming year?
2. Are there plans to fully embrace the Material 3 "expressive" direction? M3 has been evolving to be much more fluid and customizable, and it would be great to know if the roadmap includes adapting the library to support these newer, more complex expressive design guidelines.
3. Is the project transitioning into more of a "maintenance mode" (just bug fixes and version bumps)?
4. How can the community step up to help? (e.g., specific PRs you need reviewed, triage help, etc.)

I really appreciate everything this team has built, and I just wanted to open a transparent thread about where things are headed. Thanks in advance for any insights!

[satya164]

Hey @AbhinayMe

We are currently actively working on react-native-paper. The main focus is as follows:

• Align our components with the latest Material Design 3 guidelines
• Refactor components with slower performance
• Review and update some of the APIs to fix issues (such as usage of React.Children that makes composition harder)

The majority of these changes are planned for the next major version (v6).

Meanwhile, feel free to look around the repo and send PRs for smaller bugs that you find, add missing repros for any issues that don't have them, answer help questions, etc. If you can test out open PRs, then it's also welcome.

If you have specific ideas or questions, you're welcome to join our Discord (link in README) and write there. Feel free to ping us with questions/suggestions there, and I'll try my best to respond.

[AbhinayMe]

@satya164 Thanks for getting back to me so fast! That is a huge relief to hear, and v6 sounds exactly like what the library needs right now.

Just a friendly suggestion from the community side: it might be worth throwing up a quick pinned issue or a note in the README about v6 being in the works. Because there isn't really a public roadmap right now, a lot of us on the outside kind of just assumed the project was quietly fading out. Even just a tiny bit of visibility on the v6 goals would go a long way to reassure folks that RNP is still alive and kicking!

I'm also really glad you mentioned updating the React.Children APIs. Those composition bottlenecks have definitely been a headache lately—especially when trying to customize things like Dialogs (#4933) and AppBars (#4934)—so seeing that refactored will be amazing.

I've already hopped into the Discord and I'll take a look at the open PRs to see where I can help out with testing and repros. Thanks again for the update!

[satya164]

The main branch should now have the activity for v6. For a public roadmap, I'll see what I can do.

[AbhinayMe]

Really appreciate it. Thank you.