@facilitronworks/react-native-windows-modal

A drop-in replacement for react-native's <Modal> that works on React Native Windows new architecture (Fabric / Composition), where the core <Modal> does not.

JS/TSX only — no native code, no autolinking, no rebuild.

Status: pre-release (0.1.0-pre.1). Extracted from a shipping production Windows app (RNW 0.83.2) where it replaced every broken modal in the app.

What is verified here: see Verification status.

Why this exists

On RNW new-arch, <Modal> is backed by the native WindowsModalHostView (Microsoft.ReactNative/Fabric/Composition/Modal). That component does not render an in-app overlay the way iOS and Android do. It spins up a separate top-level OS window — DesktopPopupSiteBridge + OverlappedPresenter.IsModal(true) — with its own native title bar, border and close (X) button, and sizes that window from the child's layout frame (ContentSizePolicy::None → AdjustWindowSize).

Two consequences break real-world modals:

1. transparent + flex content renders as an empty, unclosable shell. The overwhelmingly common modal pattern is a transparent host with a full-bleed overlay child:

<Modal transparent visible={open} onRequestClose={close}>
  <View style={{ flex: 1 }}>…</View>
</Modal>

Inside a content-sized popup there is no bounded size for flex: 1 to fill, so the frame measures {0, 0}, AdjustWindowSize bails, and you get an empty window. Worse, it is stuck: the in-content close button never mounts because the content never laid out, and the native title-bar X only emits onRequestClose — it does not close the window itself. If your handler is on the content that never rendered, there is no way out of the modal.

2. Non-transparent full-screen content becomes a second desktop window. Complete with title bar and chrome — nothing like the in-app sheet the same code produces on iOS and Android.

The fix

react-native-paper's <Modal> works on RNW precisely because it renders an in-tree <Portal> overlay in the same window/island — no native modal host is involved. This package mirrors that approach behind the standard <Modal> API:

• On Windows: renders children into an absolutely-positioned, root-level <Portal> overlay. StyleSheet.absoluteFill gives the overlay a definite size, which is exactly what the content-sized native popup could not provide — so flex: 1 children lay out correctly.
• On every other platform: delegates to the real react-native <Modal>, props spread through unchanged. iOS / Android / web behaviour is byte-for-byte identical.

That means you can swap the import globally and only change Windows behaviour.

Installation

npm install @facilitronworks/react-native-windows-modal
# or: yarn add @facilitronworks/react-native-windows-modal

Peer dependencies: react, react-native, and react-native-paper >= 5 — Paper's Portal is the overlay host, and Paper's useTheme() supplies the background colour for non-transparent modals.

You must have a <PaperProvider> (or a bare <Portal.Host>) mounted at your app root. That is what the Portal renders into. Without it the modal renders nothing on Windows.

// app root
<PaperProvider>
  <App />
</PaperProvider>

Usage

import WindowsModal from '@facilitronworks/react-native-windows-modal';

<WindowsModal transparent visible={open} onRequestClose={close}>
  <View style={{ flex: 1, justifyContent: 'center' }}>
    …
  </View>
</WindowsModal>

The simplest adoption is a project-wide import swap:

- import { Modal } from 'react-native';
+ import WindowsModal as Modal from '@facilitronworks/react-native-windows-modal';

Both a named export (WindowsModal) and a default export are provided.

Supported props, and what is ignored on Windows

Every ModalProps is forwarded verbatim on non-Windows platforms. On Windows, only the props that are meaningful for an in-tree overlay are honoured:

Session replay / FullStory

FullStory (React Native) masks all content by default and reveals an element only when it carries the fs-unmask marker. On Windows this component renders its overlay with a plain react-native View, so — unlike the app-internal View wrapper it was extracted from, which hardcoded fsClass="fs-unmask" — the modal is masked in session replay.

To un-mask it, pass unmask:

<WindowsModal transparent visible={open} onRequestClose={close} unmask>
  …
</WindowsModal>

This forwards fsClass="fs-unmask" onto the overlay View. It defaults to false (masked) — the safe FullStory default — so opt in only where the modal content is safe to show in replay. Windows-only (the overlay is Windows-only); it is inert on other platforms.

Traps you will hit

• No <Portal.Host> means no modal. The single most likely failure. If your app root has no PaperProvider, the Windows path silently renders nothing.
• This is not a real modal — it does not trap focus. It is an overlay in the same window. Keyboard focus and screen-reader traversal can still reach the app tree underneath. Do not rely on it for anything security- or correctness-critical.
• Escape does not close it. The native title-bar X is gone (that is the point), but nothing replaces it — wire your own key handling if you need it.
• The backdrop only exists when you pass onRequestClose. Without that prop there is no Pressable scrim, so tapping outside does nothing. This is deliberate — a scrim that cannot close anything is a trap.
• animationType silently does nothing on Windows. Modals appear and disappear instantly; a design that depends on a slide-in will look abrupt.
• Sibling z-order. The overlay sets zIndex/elevation 9999, but two of these open simultaneously stack in Portal order, not by any explicit priority.
• transparent behaves differently than you might read it. It controls whether this component paints a background fill, not whether the OS window is transparent (there is no OS window).

Verification status

Verified, on this exact packaged source:

• Typechecks clean under TypeScript 5.9 in strict mode, resolved against real react, react-native, react-native-paper and @types/react installations (RN 0.83.2, Paper 5.14.5).
• npm pack produces a tarball containing the actual TSX source.

NOT verified — do not assume any of these:

• Runtime behaviour of this package. The logic is production-proven in the app it was extracted from, but the code as packaged here has not been rendered — not on Windows, not on any platform.

• Two extraction changes are new and unexercised. The original used app-local modules; both were generalised for this package:

  1. the overlay container was an app-internal View wrapper (adding only a FullStory fsClass prop) → now a plain react-native View that re-applies fsClass="fs-unmask" only when the unmask prop is set;
  2. the background colour came from an app-local theme context → now useTheme() from react-native-paper.

  These compile and typecheck; they have not been observed on screen. The Paper useTheme() swap in particular assumes your Paper theme's colors.background is the colour you want behind a non-transparent modal.

• No example app, no automated tests, no CI.

• Behaviour with nested modals, and interaction with other Portal users, is untested.

License

MIT