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Build watchOS apps with React, rendered as native SwiftUI. React runs in Hermes on the watch and drives a SwiftUI view tree via JSI — no WebViews, no canvas, no compromises.

⚠️ Pre-release. The renderer, JS runtime, Fast Refresh, and Watch Connectivity bridge are working end-to-end, but APIs may still change and the non-Expo path is not documented yet.

Quick start (Expo)

npx expo install @appsent-co/react-native-watchos @bacons/apple-targets
npx react-native-watchos init

init runs Evan Bacon's create-target watch, drops a working ContentView.swift into targets/<name>/, scaffolds index.watchos.tsx, and patches your app.json to register the @appsent-co/react-native-watchos config plugin after @bacons/apple-targets.

Add the Metro helper to your metro.config.js so Metro resolves *.watchos.{ts,tsx,js,jsx} for ?platform=watchos requests:

const { getDefaultConfig } = require('expo/metro-config');
const { withWatchosMetro } = require('@appsent-co/react-native-watchos/metro-config');

module.exports = withWatchosMetro(getDefaultConfig(__dirname));

Then prebuild and run:

npx expo prebuild -p ios --clean
npx expo run:ios

Pure React Native (non-Expo)

Guide in progress. The Swift Package, Metro helper, and renderer all work without Expo — the missing piece is a non-Expo equivalent of the watch-target generation and Release bundle build phase that the config plugin currently handles for you.

Features

Renderer — React 19 rendering to native SwiftUI, with support for most of the SwiftUI API: layout containers, lists, forms, navigation, controls, media, shapes, gradients, and watch-specific modifiers like digital crown rotation and sensory feedback. See src/components/ and src/modifiers/ for the full surface.

JS runtime — Hermes embedded on watchOS via JSI, with console.*, timers, fetch / XMLHttpRequest, and WebSocket installed.

TurboModules — Create native modules in Swift / Obj-C++ and call them from JS with full codegen support.

Watch Connectivity — Bidirectional messaging, user-info / app context sync, reachability and activation state, binary payloads — exposed from src/watchConnectivity/.

Dev experience — Metro ?platform=watchos resolution via withWatchosMetro, Fast Refresh over WebSocket, shake-to-reload (~2.3g), on-device error toast, and console.* forwarded to the Metro terminal.

Expo plugin — Wires the Swift Package into your watch target, runs autolinking with a customizable watchOS deployment target, installs the Release bundle build phase (expo export:embed --platform watchos), and runs codegen for the WatchConnectivity spec.

Customizing the watch target

Icons, display name, Info.plist entries, capabilities, deployment target — anything about the watch target itself is governed by expo-target.config.{json,js} from @bacons/apple-targets. This package only owns the runtime side.

Example

A working example app lives in example/ — a component gallery, a task-tracking app (Sweepy), and a Pokédex demo.

License

MIT