DESCRIPTION:

react-native-webview is widely used, but maintenance feels stale. Critical issues like https://github.com/react-native-webview/react-native-webview/issues/3776 and https://github.com/react-native-webview/react-native-webview/issues/3825 have been open for a long time.

Expo already ships @expo/dom-webview for DOM components (https://www.npmjs.com/package/@expo/dom-webview), but it does not have full feature parity with react-native-webview and is scoped to DOM components.

Proposal: ship a first-class expo-webview at the same quality bar as expo-file-system, expo-location, and expo-notifications.

Use case

I had not used WebViews much until I needed to embed an existing e-commerce site in Expo and communicate over postMessage. Many teams cannot afford to rewrite their web storefront in React Native. WebViews are not only useful for privacy-policy screens — they are a practical way to ship existing web apps inside Expo while adding native capabilities (Apple Pay, etc.) via postMessage. I am not alone: others in the Expo community are running into the same class of problems. This Discord thread describes an Expo Router app that wraps an existing mobile-friendly website with tabbed WebViews — the first tab loads fine, but others often hang mid-load or fail to load images; on iOS, incognito={true} fixes loading but breaks shared login state across tabs: https://discord.com/channels/695411232856997968/1360649231576338542

If you are doing something similar — loading a WebView, communicating with postMessage, and exposing native features to a web app that will not be rewritten soon — please comment and upvote.

Baseline expectations

Suggested architecture see attachements

On iOS, WWDC 2025 introduced a native SwiftUI WebView via WebKit for SwiftUI (iOS 26.0+), reducing the need for custom UIViewRepresentable wrappers around WKWebView.

Prior art / references

Others