---
author: "Mukul Chugh"
canonical: "https://mukulchugh.com/blog/brik-react-to-native-widgets"
description: "Home-screen widgets and Live Activities usually mean writing Swift by hand. Brik keeps that surface in React and compiles down to native."
image: "https://mukulchugh.com/og/blog/brik-react-to-native-widgets.png"
language: "en"
published: "2025-12-20"
title: "Native widgets from React, without leaving JSX"
type: "article"
---

# Native widgets from React, without leaving JSX

Every React Native team hits the same wall: you want a widget, a Live Activity, or something in the Dynamic Island, and suddenly you're maintaining SwiftUI in a separate extension target.

[Brik](https://github.com/mukulchugh/brik) is my attempt to keep that work in JSX. You describe the widget once; it compiles to SwiftUI on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android.

Widgets aren't normal RN views. They run in a tight process on the OS's schedule, often when your app isn't even open. There's no JS runtime in there. So Brik doesn't "render" at runtime: it produces native view code ahead of time.

That tradeoff is the whole product: stay in one language for the common cases, drop to native only when you must.

---

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