Devon Nakashima

Devon is a principal engineer who has been writing React Native since the 0.40 days, with fifteen years total in mobile and web. He led the rewrite of the Wealthsimple trading app from native iOS/Android to a shared RN codebase, then spent two years at Discord on the mobile experience team working on the New Architecture migration and the Hermes upgrade that shipped to 200M+ installs. These days he's an independent consultant and contracts mostly with healthtech and developer-tools companies. He's an occasional contributor to React Navigation and was a maintainer on react-native-mmkv for about a year. His writing here is opinionated and tends toward architecture-level decisions: when to drop down to native modules, how to structure feature flags across iOS and Android, and why he thinks Expo's prebuild model finally won the bare-vs-managed debate around 2024.