Zack Design has published react-native-nitro-unzip — a high-performance ZIP module for React Native, built on Nitro Modules. It extracts and creates password-protected archives on iOS and Android faster than the existing community options, with real progress callbacks and cancellation delivered directly over JSI rather than the old bridge.

Benchmarks, up front

On a 350 MB archive containing 10,000 files:

• iOS: ~500 files/sec
• Android: ~474 files/sec

Those numbers are measured with release builds, not debug — the bridge-free JSI path is a large part of why the difference shows up at all.

Feature surface

• Extraction with per-file progress (bytes extracted, files remaining, percentage complete) delivered synchronously via JSI — no bridge serialisation, no frame drops.
• Synchronous cancellation. A cancel is honoured on the next file boundary, not at the next JS tick.
• Password-protected archives. AES-256 encryption supported on both platforms for extraction and creation.
• Zip creation. Compress a directory into an archive, optionally with a password.
• Concurrent operations. Multiple tasks run independently without locking each other.
• Background execution on iOS via proper UIApplication background task management, so a 500 MB archive can finish extracting even if the user backgrounds the app.

Quick example

import { getUnzip } from 'react-native-nitro-unzip';

const unzip = getUnzip();
const task = unzip.extract('/path/to/archive.zip', '/path/to/output');

task.onProgress((p) => {
  console.log(`${(p.progress * 100).toFixed(0)}% — ${p.extractedFiles}/${p.totalFiles} files`);
});

const result = await task.await();
console.log(`Extracted ${result.extractedFiles} files in ${result.duration}ms`);

Progress callbacks fire on every file, and because they ride JSI they never queue up behind the bridge.

Why it exists

React Native has had ZIP libraries for years. Most of them predate Nitro and therefore predate modern JSI — which means every progress tick had to serialise across the bridge, every cancellation had to round-trip through an async message queue, and every archive operation paid the bridge tax proportional to the number of files. For the kind of app that extracts a single 2 MB archive at install time, none of that matters. For the kind of app that handles large user-uploaded archives, downloads payload bundles from a server, or packages up content for offline use, it matters a lot.

Internally the native side leans on battle-tested libraries — SSZipArchive on iOS, an optimised ZipInputStream path on Android — rather than reinventing the compression format. The contribution is the JSI layer, the cancellation machinery, and the progress plumbing that sits on top.

Installation and docs

npm install react-native-nitro-unzip react-native-nitro-modules
cd ios && pod install

Requires React Native 0.75+, Nitro Modules 0.34+, iOS 15.5+, and Java 17 on Android. Full docs — including extraction, compression, password handling, cancellation semantics, and the API reference auto-generated from TypeScript — live at isaacrowntree.github.io/react-native-nitro-unzip.

Source on GitHub.