[brentvatne]

react-navigation has very different goals, and it's still in beta, things like transitions are likely to change significantly before 1.0 release.

The main difference in the goals is that react-navigation is intended to be entirely cross-platform, including iOS, Android, ReactVR, and web. It's implemented entirely in JavaScript which has a huge upside because you can ship updates to it OTA and you can submit patches without needing to know ObjC/Java and the platform's respective navigation APIs. It will be an important library to push forward development of more powerful general purpose native APIs, for example the native driver for Animated was built with the intention of making it possible to run navigation transitions on the UI thread. Similarly, this will be an important use case for a better gesture API (https://twitter.com/notbrent/status/824683858037649408). I wrote more about why we should try to use JavaScript as much as possible with React Native here: https://blog.getexponent.com/good-practices-why-you-should-u...

OTOH, if what you need is a navigation library that is 100% faithful to the platform's built-in APIs, and you need that right now, then you will probably want to use something like react-native-navigation (Airbnb is working on open sourcing a similar library that they use in their app).