My take on the current state (heh) of state management in React Native, as published in the State of React Native survey: Redux’s hold on the state management scene within React Native has been slowly slipping for years. The emergence of Redux Toolkit has given new life to the project, and it’s impressive to see its usage at 62% already. Meanwhile, Zustand is a strong alternative given its familiar patterns and tiny footprint. Observable-based state management libraries such as Jotai and MobX continue to have a smaller but passionate corner of the community. There seems to be a fairly clear divide between those libraries and the selector-based libraries. React Query is very popular, and its active development and ability to work with other state management libraries gives it an edge in usage — you don’t have to choose between it and your favorite state system. You can use them both alongside each other. For state orchestration, XState has one of the largest gaps between interest (high) and usage (low). I attribute this to its initial learning curve and (necessarily) verbose syntax, as well as departure from the familiar patterns built up over the years. However, it sparks a ton of interest still due to the significant benefits it brings due to predictable and comprehensive state transitions. Apollo remains widely used, but has been slipping slowly as new alternatives pop up. It is still the strongest GraphQL-centered state system. React Query is the most common alternative to Apollo since it is easier to adopt without switching out state systems. My own MobX-State-Tree continues to be fairly niche with just 13% usage. It will be interesting to see if our investment in documentation and streamlining performance will have an impact over the next year.

I've been asked when you should use MobX-State-Tree and when you should use just MobX. Here are my thoughts: • MST is opinionated and essentially makes it harder to make poor decisions when organizing/structuring your state • MST comes with a lot of really useful tools you often need such as side effect handling, lifecycle hooks (like `afterCreate`), etc. • MobX is more flexible and gives you more freedom in how you structure things, but it's easier to shoot yourself in the foot • When you use MobX, you often end up reinventing the tools that MST provides • MobX is a lot lighter Generally, I'd recommend using MST unless you have a specific reason to just use MobX by itself.