React Native solves some real problems

React Native 0.85 ships a new Shared Animation Backend that lets layout props like width, height, and flex animate via the native driver instead of the JS thread, eliminating a long-standing source of frame drops. The release also unifies the Animated API and Reanimated under one reconciliation engine, improves DevTools to support simultaneous CDP connections, adds TLS support to Metro for local dev, and extracts the Jest preset into its own package. The newsletter also covers Railway moving off Next.js to Vite + TanStack Router, TanStack's new AI Code Mode, intentionally hanging JS promises as a control flow technique, and a JavaScript array size bug explained.