Roadmap

Impulse is at 0.0.0-alpha.1. This page says what exists, so nothing on this site reads as a promise.

What ships today

	Hook
✅	useTap	A single tap
✅	useDoubleTap	Two taps in quick succession
✅	useLongPress	A press held past a duration
✅	useDrag	A drag, streaming where it is
✅	usePan	A pan, streaming how the finger moved
✅	useSwipe	A pan judged at release, with a direction
✅	usePinch	A two-finger pinch that owns its scale
✅	useRotate	A two-finger rotation, in degrees
✅	useGestures	Composition under one relation
✅	useRawGesture	The mechanism-level escape hatch
✅	alongside / blocks / deferTo	Coexistence, on every hook

Designed, not written

Do not import these. They are decisions that have been made, not features that exist.

useHover · useEdgeSwipe

Milestones

1 — The composition and coexistence core

The genuinely hard part, built first, because every intent depends on it.

The code is complete. The mechanical half of the gate passes. The feel half has no result.

Gate: a horizontal useDrag inside a vertical ScrollView works on iOS and Android hardware, and a useTap / useDoubleTap race resolves correctly. Verified on a device, not in Jest.

A device sweep ran on 2026-09-19 and 2026-09-20, on an Android emulator with injected touches and on an iOS simulator with XCUITest. Both checks passed on both platforms:

• A horizontal useDrag row opens to exactly its target of 120 points. A vertical drag that starts on a row scrolls the list, with no relation declared.
• The race resolves. Below maxDelay, two taps gave one double tap and no single tap. Above it, two taps gave two single taps and no double tap.

The sweep does not measure feel, and no physical device has run it. So each activation-criteria default on this site is still a design intention, and each page says what the sweep proved and what it did not.

2 — The intent set

Eight of ten intents exist. Each one needs a screen, a docs page, and a device pass. The device sweep drove all eight on at least one platform. None of them has a feel result.

• Written, tested, documented, and on a screen — useTap, useDoubleTap, useLongPress, useDrag, usePan, useSwipe, usePinch, useRotate.
• Designed only — useHover, useEdgeSwipe.

3 — The Inertia bridge

@rootnative/impulse/inertia — adapting a release payload into @rootnative/inertia's release transitions.

It will be an optional subpath. Impulse will never require an animation library, which is the whole reason it is a separate package.

Gate: a swipe-to-dismiss row and a pinch-to-zoom viewer built from Impulse plus Inertia, with no gesture-handler or Reanimated import in the consumer code.

Known gaps

Honest rather than empty. The ones a consumer can hit:

• A relation against a plain React Native ScrollView is dropped. The ref carries no handlerTag, so gesture-handler installs nothing. Impulse warns once in development when it can see it, which is when the ref is filled by the time the gesture mounts. A target that mounts later stays silent. Use gesture-handler's ScrollView. See Coexistence.
• A missing <GestureHandlerRootView> fails silently. Impulse cannot warn, because RNGH does not export the context that would let it detect one.
• A cancel is reported, but the velocity that comes with it is not a throw. Every end callback fires on both paths and carries cancelled. The finger never lifted on the cancelled one, so springing on velocity flings a view the user never released. See Web behaviour.
• A relation target needs a cast. RNGH types it as a ref to a component type, which is not what ref={} produces.
• useLongPress's maxDistance cancels an active press on web, against RNGH's own documented contract. Hold-then-drag does not work there at the default.
• No activation default has a feel result. The device sweep proved that some defaults work: the drag threshold, useSwipe's commitDistance of 80 points, and maxDelay at 500 ms and 250 ms. It did not prove that any of them feels right. useSwipe's commitSpeed of 800 points per second is not tested, because neither harness can make a swipe that is short enough and fast enough. usePinch and useRotate add no default — neither RNGH recognizer exposes a threshold — so their coexistence rests entirely on a relation.
• usePinch's elastic has no recommended value. useDrag defaults it to 0 and the example screen invented 0.35. The resistance is also computed on the scale rather than on its logarithm, so pulling below min resists differently from pulling above max by the same factor. Only a hand can tell whether that reads as wrong.
• Web is surveyed by hand, not by tests. No jsdom test exists for any intent.

Out of scope indefinitely

These are not "later". They are decisions.

• Components. No <Swipeable>, no drawer, no carousel. A component makes layout and styling decisions a gesture library has no business making.
• An animation vocabulary. No springs, no transitions, no easing. Hooks return values; the consumer animates them.
• A design system. No haptics policy, no platform-conditional feel.
• Solving keyboard accessibility for gestures. Impulse names the fallback on every intent page. It does not invent a keyboard gesture model.

Before 1.0.0

The API has to be validated against one component library and one independent application, neither of which has to be ours — and the example app does not count.

An API co-designed with its only consumer cannot surface the assumptions the two share, and shared assumptions are exactly what a major version lock makes permanent.

1.0.0 is the API stability lock, not a quality signal.