Nesting Tab and Stack Navigators in React Native and Expo Apps

Navigation is an essential part of any mobile app that has multiple screens leading to a variety of interactions for the user. Building a working navigation system often requires us to create a structure that allows for different kinds of navigators working together.

Using react-navigation , you can definitely nest different types of navigators in a React Native app. The term nesting, when it comes to navigators, refers to rendering one navigator inside a screen of another navigator.

The need to nest navigators arises when you want a user to respond to different sections of the app. For example, an app that requires a user to enter credentials to access different features of the app—they have to go through either a login or signup screen. The home or the main screen might contain different tabs (think of Instagram), but the login and sign up screens are two separate screens that are pushed and pop one after the other.

A few of the possible scenarios for using nesting navigators include:

• Stack navigator nested inside drawer navigator
• Tab navigator nested inside stack navigator
• Stack navigator nested inside a tab navigator

In this tutorial, let’s examine one of the above scenarios by nesting a tab navigator inside a stack navigator. Whether you’re following from the previous tutorial on building a stack navigator using a component-based configuration with the latest version of the react-navigation library (link below), or not, here’s the source code of the Expo demo app that’s going to be leveraged. This demo app already has a stack navigator running—you can download the source code from the GitHub repo here .

You can read the complete post on setting up a Stack Navigator using react-navigation version 5 here: