>>> `REACT-NATIVE-FS` IS DEAD! LONG LIVE `REACT-NATIVE-FS` <<<

[birdofpreyru]

Hey folks!

As the surprising number of new issues opened in this repo have buried my announcement (#1197) from 2023, let me re-iterate the obvious — the react-native-fs library has been abandoned by its past maintainers long ago; its last release was in May 2022, when RN was at its v0.68, and we are now in March 2026, at RN v0.84. In 2023, when the latest react-native-fs version stopped working out of the box with the latest RN releases, I have forked it, released as a new library, and I am actively maintaining it still.

You can find my up-to-date version of the library at:

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@dr.pogodin/react-native-fs
GitHub: https://github.com/birdofpreyru/react-native-fs

What puzzles me is how it comes that my fork still has 25k weekly downloads, while the original out-dated library still has 480k weekly downloads — almost 50 times more! 😱 I guess, a bunch of people should consider upgrading their apps to the latest versions of RN and other dependencies 😅

[chichilatte]

Thanks for the heads up @birdofpreyru! I suppose the main reason is that the legacy version comes up first in the npm search results? But i was put off your library because of the number of breaking changes in minor versions – 13 sets of breaking changes over 19 minor versions, basically every 3 months. That's a daunting amount of work if anyone wants to update to yr package. And the fact that you have breaking changes in minor versions is a massive red flag for serious projects. That being said, i love your heroic work 🙏🏼

[birdofpreyru]

the number of breaking changes in minor versions – 13 sets of breaking changes over 19 minor versions, basically every 3 months

Well... most of them were just library upgrades to the newer, minor versions of React Native (which tend to roll out once each two months); which required no extra efforts in the host apps beyond upgrading to the latest RN ;) and I guess, in most cases it was still backward compatible with older, minor RN versions, I just don't test it, supporting only the latest RN release, and thus assume RN version bumps are potentially breaking.

[birdofpreyru]

P.S.: Yeah, I have been told before that my understanding of Semantic Versioning does not quite match the specs; so I call my approach The Common Sense Versioning — without it my fork of the library would be already at ~v40, without much actual changes in its API interfaces :)

[chichilatte]

Yeh i totally understand, it makes a lot of sense, especially with RN changing so frequently. But from our lazy perspective we usually have dozens and dozens of packages in a project and need a quick way to check for breaking changes (i.e. the major version bumps) without reading through the release pages.

Just noticed that expo-file-system has breaking changes in their latest minor release, so you're in good company!