Version 1.20 — Expo Snack Support, Reanimated Deprecation Path, and New Features 🧬

Meet the 1.20.0 release of react-native-keyboard-controller. It’s a small (only 500 lines of code added compared to the previous release), but a very important one - it significantly improves compatibility across the react-native ecosystem.

Curious about what’s new? Let’s dive in!

Expo Snack support

In Expo SDK 54, react-native-keyboard-controller lib was added to the Expo Go, which meant you could use the library in any project powered by Expo. However, it still was not fully compatible with Expo Snacks - trying to use it there resulted in errors.

With version 1.20.0, that limitation is finally gone. The library now works seamlessly in Expo Snacks as well! 🎉 This means you can easily share code, create reproduction examples, and test everything directly in the browser. It’s also a big win for the library itself - I can now rework the documentation and turn all the example code into fully interactive sandboxes.

Below is an embedded Snack that includes the code I used for my AppJS Conf demo this year:

1.13.x Flashbacks

To support Expo Snacks I had to rewrite the mechanism that propagates events to worklet handlers. The last time I made a change like this was in the 1.13.x release, and in the beginning of this release I've received many bug reports that something wasn't working in various setups.

The new approach shouldn't cause issues, but I can not guarantee that nothing will break - every React Native project is unique, and unexpected edge cases do happen. If you notice any incompatibilities between 1.19.x and 1.20.x, please bare with me and report a bug. I promise to address everything and ensure even wider compatibility than before!

Deprecated useAnimatedKeyboard hook from react-native-reanimated

The react-native-reanimated used to provide its own hook for tracking keyboard movement: useAnimatedKeyboard.

Starting from react-native-reanimated@4.2.0, the Reanimated team decided to stop supporting this hook and officially deprecated it and now they recommend to migrate to react-native-keyboard-controller instead.

We’ve worked closely together to prepare a migration guide and ensure the transition is as smooth as possible. To help with that, I added a compatibility version of useAnimatedKeyboard directly into this library.

If you're migrating from react-native-reanimated to react-native-keyboard-controller and don't want to re-write your entire codebase right away, you can simply switch your imports to the compat layer:

-import {useAnimatedKeyboard, KeyboardState} from "react-native-reanimated";
+import {useAnimatedKeyboard, KeyboardState} from "react-native-keyboard-controller";

That’s all you need to do. If you encounter any bugs or issues, please report them in the react-native-keyboard-controller repository.

New assureFocusedInputVisible method for KeyboardAwareScrollView

The KeyboardAwareScrollView already tracks a lot of things - keyboard movements, layout changes of the focused input, cursor position updates, and more. However, in some cases the layout inside the KeyboardAwareScrollView can shift unexpectedly (for example, after showing validation errors), and these changes are difficult to track natively.

Previously, ensuring the focused input stayed visible required writing custom logic to estimate how far the view should scroll. This approach came with several drawbacks:

• you had to write and maintain quite a bit of custom code;
• the scroll estimation was often inaccurate, especially when users had increased font sizes or other accessibility settings enabled;

Focused input gets hidden after validation	Focused input remains visible after validation and gets auto-scrolled

Starting from react-native-keyboard-controller@1.20.0, there’s now a built-in solution: a new method on KeyboardAwareScrollView called assureFocusedInputVisible.

import {
  KeyboardAwareScrollView,
  KeyboardAwareScrollViewRef,
} from "react-native-keyboard-controller";

function LongForm() {
  const ref = useRef<KeyboardAwareScrollViewRef>(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    ref.current?.assureFocusedInputVisible();
  }, [errors]);

  return (
    <KeyboardAwareScrollView ref={ref} bottomOffset={50}>
      {/*...*/}
    </KeyboardAwareScrollView>
  );
}

With this method, you can ensure that the focused input always remains visible — even after layout changes — with pixel-perfect accuracy across all configurations, including when accessibility settings like larger fonts are enabled.

Achieved milestones

I expect this to be the last minor release of the year (though I’ll continue shipping patch releases), so it feels like the right moment to look back at what we’ve all accomplished together. With 2026 around the corner, here’s a small retrospective — similar to the one I did back in 2023.

📦 5 releases per year

We’re moving at a fast pace: just like in previous years, we shipped over five releases in 2025 — each one bringing new features, improvements, and community-requested enhancements.

🌟 3100 stars on GitHub

In just two years, the library gained 2000+ new GitHub stars. That number still blows my mind. Two years ago we crossed the 1000-star mark — something that already felt surreal — and now we’re at 3100+.

Thank you to every developer who uses the library, reports issues, contributes ideas, or simply stars the repo. It truly means a lot ❤️

📈 450k weekly downloads on npm

Two years ago, the library had around 8,000 weekly downloads. Today, it’s at 450,000+ — a 56× growth in just 24 months.

This incredible adoption is a clear sign of how essential smooth keyboard handling is in the React Native ecosystem.

🤝 Impact on open source community

react-native-keyboard-controller is now widely used across the ecosystem - from individual developers to large-scale production apps. Some well-known adopters include:

• Bluesky - powering polished keyboard interactions in a high-traffic social app
• Expensify - used in a massive cross-platform codebase with millions of users
• V0 (Vercel) - helping elevate UX in modern React Native experiences

Seeing the library become part of the toolchain for such impactful products is incredibly motivating — and a reminder of why maintaining open source is worth the effort.

❤️ Sponsors support

I want to take a moment to express my deepest gratitude to all the sponsors who support this project. Your contributions genuinely make a difference - without you, it simply wouldn’t be possible to maintain the library at this level of quality, release new features, fix issues quickly, and keep pushing the ecosystem forward.

Open source takes time, energy, and consistency, and your support is what makes that effort sustainable. Thank you for believing in the project, for investing in its future, and for helping thousands of developers build better products every day. ❤️

A huge thank you to all my sponsors: Hirbod, MarceloPrado, mrtawil, ksugaevskaya. VladyslavMartynov10, devoren, bousouninjin, pouyaemami, matinzd, floydkim, Stafox, wise-danya, ronintechnologies, Kasendwa, KingDoxik, plantrail, flexbox, Mako-L, mk-nickyang, jerrickhakim, GNUGradyn, Toby56 and xoyseau.

🤔 What's next?

As always, my top focus is resolving open issues and keeping the library stable for everyone:

• Issues with more 👍 reactions are prioritized first — that’s how I track what matters most to the community.
• Issues labeled “sponsor 💖” receive highest priority as part of dedicated sponsor support.

As always stay tuned and follow me on Twitter and GitHub for updates. Thank you for your support! 😊