As indicated in the README of this project, Native Navigation is currently in "beta", and not recommended for production use in its current state.
We wanted to make Native Navigation public so that we could collaborate in the open and make sure that we are making API decisions that can be useful for more people.
In the process of decoupling this library from Airbnb's internal navigation infrastructure, we have had to make a lot of changes to the code in order to make it extensible to work both for Airbnb and for others. In order to accomplish the level of extensibility we wanted, we had to refactor a lot of the code base, and so the library now has a lot of code that has not yet been tested in a production environment.
There are several things that we would like to do before we can recommend it for use in production apps. Right now, those things are primarily the following:
The most important test that we can have is the test of us actually using this library in the main Airbnb app for every React Native flow we have in production, completely moving over our current navigation solution to this library.
One of the primary goals of Native Navigation is to allow for custom navigation implementations to be injected into the library and allow for really custom branded navigation implementations to easily integrate with React Native through Native Navigation, while successfully abstracting away a lot of the non-trivial parts of navigation.
Note: This is where YOU can help! If you are wanting to use Native Navigation for exactly this purpose but have some non-trivial requirements, please file an issue so we can talk about it!
We need to figure out the right way to expose deep linking with this library in a way that doesn't lock people in to any one deep linking library.
Beyond a 1.0 release, there are a lot of ideas we have for this library that we are excited to work on! While these are not necessary for a 1.0 release, we hope to work on them in parallel, or have interested commmunity members help out!
These features include (but are certainly not limited to!):
On iOS, ViewController transitions can be animated using Lottie. It's possible we could add support for such a feature into Native Navigation.
A second navigation implementation could be shipped with this library that allows for navigation components such as the navigation bar and tab bars be rendered using React Native just like the rest of your React Native app.
OK, We realize it's a little wonky for a "Native Navigation" library to have a web version... but why not?!
Just like the iOS and Android implementations of Native Navigation hide behind a common JS interface, a JS-based web navigator could also implement the same interface, helping pave a path towards cross-platform development!