Achieving Liquid Glass Effects in React Native: Leveraging Native Modules for High Fidelity

React Native is notably better positioned to achieve high-fidelity "Liquid Glass" or glassmorphism effects, primarily due to its architectural approach that allows for effective leveraging of native modules. This capability provides a distinct advantage in replicating complex, OS-level visual effects.

React Native's strength lies in its ability to utilize native modules for optimized solutions. Unlike frameworks that render everything on a custom canvas, React Native can tap into platform-specific rendering capabilities and effects more directly through its bridge to native code. This means that for effects like 'Liquid Glass', the bridge, often cited as a performance bottleneck for JavaScript-heavy operations, paradoxically becomes a powerful gateway for accessing native blur and rendering capabilities. This architectural flexibility allows React Native to quickly adopt and optimize for new OS-level UI paradigms, achieving visual parity with native apps for specific, performance-critical UI elements. The New Architecture (Fabric/TurboModules) in Expo SDK 53 further aims to optimize this by reducing the bridge's overhead. You can read discussions around Flutter's challenges with this on this GitHub issue.

Key Libraries for Glassmorphism in React Native

Several key libraries and approaches facilitate the implementation of these effects in React Native:

• react-native-blur: A primary tool for achieving the essential blur effects that form the core of glassmorphism.
• @metafic-co/react-native-glassmorphism: This library wraps @react-native-community/blur to provide pre-built glassmorphed components, including Views, TextInputs, and Buttons, simplifying the integration of this design aesthetic. You can find this package on NPM.
• React Native Reanimated: A high-performance library that offloads animation calculations to the native thread, ensuring smooth and stutter-free transitions, particularly crucial for gesture-based interactions and complex UI effects. It is a popular animation library as noted by Intertoons and Aneeqakhan's dev.to blog.
• Gesture Handler: Works seamlessly with Reanimated to provide robust gesture recognition, crucial for interactive glassmorphism effects.
• React Native Skia: Offers potential for complex 2D graphics rendering and custom UI effects, providing further avenues for advanced visual implementations.
• Animated API: Even the built-in Animated API can be used for basic transitions, with its useNativeDriver option contributing to performance by sending animation details to native before execution.

The existence of such dedicated libraries, built upon a core blur module, indicates a mature ecosystem where developers have access to pre-built components and established patterns, significantly reducing developer friction and time-to-market for apps requiring these specific visual effects. React Native's ability to leverage hardware-accelerated animations further contributes to its superior performance in this domain. You can read more about how React Native compares to Flutter in this regard on the Ni18 blog.