v0.5.0

0.5.0 (2026-07-28)

Initial public release 🎉

PlainText renders a single string straight to the platform's native text
widget — UILabel on iOS, TextView on Android — instead of going through
React Native's own text layout pipeline.

Performance vs RN <Text>

Release builds, mean of 3 runs, measured with the example app's Performance
tab. Compare each figure against RN <Text> on the same device and text size;
see measuring.md for the method.

	iOS	Android
Memory per mounted view	15–25% lower	~33% lower
Time to mount 1000 views	13–21% faster	~30% faster

What's supported

Styles

• fontSize
• color
• fontWeight
• fontFamily
• lineHeight
• fontStyle: 'normal' | 'italic'
• textAlign
• textDecorationLine: 'none' | 'underline' | 'line-through' | 'underline line-through'
• letterSpacing
• verticalAlign / textAlignVertical:Android only, matching RN <Text>
• Every other ViewStyle prop (width, height, margin, padding, backgroundColor, opacity, …), forwarded to the native view as-is

Props

• children: plain string only
• numberOfLines
• ellipsizeMode: 'head' | 'middle' | 'tail' | 'clip'
• allowFontScaling / maxFontSizeMultiplier: accessibility text scaling
• testID, accessibilityRole, accessibilityLabel, accessibilityHint, accessibilityState, nativeID and the rest of the accessibility props
• Self-sizing: views measure to their content, so no explicit width / height is needed

Not supported

Deliberately excluded:

• Nested <Text> and mixed-style fragments: one string, one style
• onPress / onLongPress / onResponder*: wrap it in Pressable
• selectable / selectionColor / suppressHighlighting: UILabel isn't selectable by design; use RN's <Text>
• dataDetectorType: auto-linking needs attributed text spans
• textTransform: do it in JS (children.toUpperCase())
• writingDirection: RTL belongs in I18nManager, globally
• textBreakStrategy / lineBreakStrategyIOS / android_hyphenationFrequency
• onTextLayout: heavy line-metrics payload; deferred until there's demand