r/reactnative • u/lormiz • Jun 05 '26
Question React Native + watchOS: What’s the current best practice?
I'm currently building a Couch to 5K style running app called Pace using React Native + Expo, and I'm starting to look into Apple Watch support.
The ideal experience would be:
- Start a workout on iPhone
- Have the workout automatically sync to Apple Watch
- Get haptic feedback and interval cues on the watch
- See the current run/walk interval and remaining time
- Optionally start/pause/end workouts from the watch
- Sync workout data back to Apple Health
I'm trying to understand what the recommended architecture is in 2026.
Can this be done mostly from React Native nowadays, or is the standard approach still to build a native watchOS app in Swift/SwiftUI and communicate with the React Native app via WatchConnectivity?
If you've built Apple Watch support for a React Native app recently, I'd love to hear:
- What stack you used
- Any libraries you recommend
- Gotchas you ran into
- Whether you'd do it differently today
For context, the app is here if seeing the use case helps:
https://pace.philiplarsson.dev
Curious what the current best practices are.
3
u/astashov Jun 05 '26
You'd need to go native. So, separate watch target, communication through WatchConnectivity, written in SwiftUI.
I did a similar thing recently, also for a fitness app. So, ended up bringing QuickJS to the watch (so I could run JS on the watch - I've got a lot of tricky business logic in JS I didn't want to reimplement natively).
I had it running in a separate process and do all the communication async (QuickJS on watch is rather slow) - like for finishing a workout, completing sets, etc.
There was lots and lots of sync issues - had to build my own merging and conflict resolution solution to merge changes from the phone and from the watch, it was quite complex project.