React Native Lists - RecyclerView & UITableView

Question

I'm curious why React Native doesn't utilize the native platform list components such as RecyclerView for Android and UITableView (CollectionView) for iOS.

This could ideally provide a lot more feature support and improved performance then what is currently available.

Is there a reason the React Native lists are solely backed by ScrollViews instead?

Answer 1

I couldn't personally tell you but quoting the Author.

UITableView API is not well suited for the asynchronous nature of ReactNative, and the resulting code was pretty gross, especially when trying to do smooth animations to grow the heights of rows, which we do in the groups app.

Source: Early discussion on the very point.