Migrating to v3 from v2 is not performant

[henrikra]

I have been using version 2.8.1 and the performance is great. But now I tried migrating to 3.2.1 and the performance is very laggy when opening and closing keyboard on iOS. I have added videos of 2.8.1 and 3.2.1.

I guess it is something related to how sticky dates are rendered. Since as you can see from the video with 3.2.1 the dates kinda disappear when keyboard is open but with 2.8.1 they stay there

3.2.1 (slow and sticky dates disappear)

ScreenRecording_11-26-2025.12-05-30_1.MP4

2.8.1 (runs smoothly and sticky dates stay there)

ScreenRecording_11-26-2025.12-06-18_1.MP4

@kesha-antonov Do you know what is going on?

[henrikra]

@kesha-antonov to be clear the migration from 2 -> 3 does not required new native build since there are no new native dependencies?

[kesha-antonov]

Hi

Interesting, thanks for the issue
I'll try some tests

[kesha-antonov]

Btw I really like how you designed reactions on messages. Maybe you could implement PR with this functionality?

@henrikra

[kesha-antonov]

@kesha-antonov to be clear the migration from 2 -> 3 does not required new native build since there are no new native dependencies?

Could you check if your app re-renders messages when keyboard shows/hides?

[kesha-antonov]

I think it also can be because we change height of view with messages when keyboard changes visiblity and position of dates gets recalculated and we see visual glitch

You can play around with keyboardAvoidingViewProps passed to https://kirillzyusko.github.io/react-native-keyboard-controller/docs/api/components/keyboard-avoiding-view to check if that's the case

[kesha-antonov]

@henrikra could you try this code? #2678

[henrikra]

@kesha-antonov yeah the performance is good now when you use isDayAnimationEnabled={false} 👍 But problem now is that the dates don't have the sticky animation anymore like there was in 2.8.1 🥲 Is there way to make the animation performant while opening and closing the keyboard?

[henrikra]

Btw I really like how you designed reactions on messages. Maybe you could implement PR with this functionality?

@henrikra

I used the renderCustomView prop to render them

[kesha-antonov]

@kesha-antonov yeah the performance is good now when you use isDayAnimationEnabled={false} 👍 But problem now is that the dates don't have the sticky animation anymore like there was in 2.8.1 🥲 Is there way to make the animation performant while opening and closing the keyboard?

Could you please send video how it was before update?

You mean you want to keep isDayAnimationEnabled={true} and have performant animation while toggling keyboard?

[henrikra]

@kesha-antonov yes that is what I mean! I would like to have the sticky animations but keep keyboard toggling performant.

Here you can see how the dates are sticky on the top with 2.8.1

ScreenRecording_11-28-2025.14-57-29_1.MP4

And here 3.2.2 the date are not sticky at all with isDayAnimationEnabled={false}

ScreenRecording_11-28-2025.14-56-40_1.MP4

But with 3.2.2 isDayAnimationEnabled={true} the keyboard toggling is very laggy

[kesha-antonov]

Yeah, I see low fps in example

[kesha-antonov]

Seems like it's because now we resizing view so on scroll to top we could see all the messages and thus on resize event we do recalculations of dates on each frame and it is a lot

Need to think how to optimize it