Difference between Pressable and TouchableOpacity

Here is a picture to clear your doubt.

How it works On an element wrapped by

Pressable

:

onPressIn is called when a press is activated. onPressOut is called when the press gesture is deactivated.

After pressing onPressIn, one of two things will happen:

1. The person will remove their finger, triggering onPressOut followed by onPress.
2. If the person leaves their finger longer than 370 milliseconds before removing it, onLongPress is triggered. (onPressOut will still fire when they remove their finger.)

Please refer to documentation for more details.

Pressable was a new introduction to RN 0.63, prior to that,Touchable Opacity was the most common used Component to wrap a component or simliar components.

Both their basic functionalities are same, to make a text/image clickable and user interactive.

But with Pressable you get to access a lot new props like :

HitRect, which is such a cool feature, acc to docs :

Fingers are not the most precise instruments, and it is common for users to accidentally activate the wrong element or miss the activation area. To help, Pressable has an optional HitRect you can use to define how far a touch can register away from the the wrapped element. Presses can start anywhere within a HitRect.

This is clearly a better alternative to what we used for hitslop , here its more precise and you define the area.And it doesnt interfere with the child/other components Z-index too.

So basically you get all the feature of a button, touchableOpacity with cool new props. Do check out thier docs : rn-pressable

NOTE: Also as other comments in this thread suggests, Pressable still doesnt have an animation attached with the onPress Event

Hopeit helps.feel free for doubts

Just wanted to add a note about one drawback of Pressable and a workaround.

The drawback is Pressable has no automatic feedback like its TouchableOpacity counterpart.

However, you can add your own custom feedback with Pressable's style prop, which comes with a pressed state identifier:

<Pressable
  style={({ pressed }) => [
    { opacity: pressed ? 0.5 : 1.0 }
  ]}
  onPress={() => console.log('Pressed')}
>
 <View><Text>Press Me</Text></View>
</Pressable>