Microsoft’s latest React Native Windows release removes the legacy architecture entirely, requiring developers to migrate to Fabric and update to Visual Studio 2026, .NET 10 and Windows App SDK 1.8.
Microsoft has released React Native Windows 0.85.0, a version built on React Native 0.85.3 that brings the Windows edition of the framework fully onto the New Architecture. The move is not incremental: the legacy architecture has been removed, so applications still relying on the old stack must migrate to Fabric before upgrading. Microsoft says the release also aligns with the broader React Native 0.85 line, which introduced changes in the core framework around animation, testing and development tooling.
The upgrade comes with a new build baseline. According to Microsoft’s release notes and the project’s GitHub repository, React Native Windows 0.85 requires Visual Studio 2026, .NET 10 and Windows App SDK 1.8. That makes the release as much an environment update as a framework update, and teams planning an upgrade will need to refresh their Windows build tooling before compiling against the new version.
Several component-level features arrive with the release. Modal now supports hiding the title bar and border, which gives Windows developers more control over dialog presentation. View gains outline style properties, while TurboModules can now be initialised eagerly on an opt-in basis for apps that need native modules ready earlier in start-up. Tooltips have also been adjusted so they can appear on keyboard focus, with only one shown at a time, bringing behaviour closer to expected accessibility and keyboard interaction patterns. For Win32 applications, ReactNativeWindow is now exposed from ReactNativeWin32App for direct access to the host window.
Microsoft says the release also includes a wide set of reliability fixes across text, touch, rendering, accessibility and runtime behaviour. TextInput scaling is corrected across different display scales, Unicode length handling has been repaired, and a multiline crash tied to draw re-entrancy has been fixed. Touch input should now be more dependable on high-DPI displays, while ScrollView issues such as keyboard scroll drift and lost pointer capture have been addressed. Rendering fixes cover rounded borders, image refreshes when a source changes and contrast on inactive modal title bars. On the accessibility side, UI Automation selection events now fire when selected state changes. The release notes also mention runtime crash fixes, WebSocket binary handling changes, improved text rendering performance and updates to the CLI and templates, including the ability for run-windows to start Metro on a custom port.
The Windows release sits alongside the wider React Native 0.85 update, which, according to the main React Native blog and release overview, added a new animation backend, moved the Jest preset into a separate package and improved DevTools support. For Windows developers, however, the headline change is the architectural clean-up and platform refresh. Microsoft is directing users to the current getting-started guide and the React Native Gallery app as the quickest way to evaluate the new behaviour before migrating production projects.
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