Unistyles Support

React Native Boost is compatible with react-native-unistyles v3. Previous versions of Unistyles are untested and not officially supported.

Setup

Enable Boost's Unistyles support layer through the Babel plugin's config options:

// babel.config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    ['react-native-boost/plugin', { unistyles: true }],
    ['react-native-unistyles/plugin', { root: 'src' }],
  ],
};

Set unistyles: false to turn the mode off, e.g. when Unistyles is installed in your project's dependencies, but not actually used in code. The order of the two plugins does not matter.

How it works

Unistyles updates styles natively, outside of React.

In Unistyles mode, Boost looks at each Text/View's style and routes accordingly:

• A Unistyles style (from StyleSheet.create imported from react-native-unistyles) → rewritten to Unistyles' own lean host, keeping Unistyles' reactivity, while still providing Boost's performance benefits.
• A plain React Native style (an object literal, or a StyleSheet.create from react-native) → optimized to Boost's standard native host, exactly as in a non-Unistyles app.
• A style Boost can't resolve (e.g. style={props.style}, a function call, a conditional) → left untouched. When Boost can't reliably tell if it's a Unistyles style arriving from elsewhere or a plain style object, it has to skip it. When Unistyles mode is disabled, this does not apply, and all components (that don't bail for other reasons) are optimized, no matter where their style comes from.

Known limitations

The native components React Native Boost rewrites your components to don't perform some of the prop and style processing the standard JS-based wrapper components do. Without Unistyles, React Native Boost can do this processing for you. With Unistyles, this isn't possible, unfortunately. Therefore:

Boost forwards a Unistyles style to the native host untouched (this is what preserves Unistyles' reactivity), so the raw forms reach the host as-is. The right-hand values are already in their native form, so they work whether or not Unistyles is in play. These only affect Text.