The Sandbox Brief

Plaid rebuilds its mobile SDKs from the ground up

July 3, 2026 · by Eve Harper

Part of the archive: a retrospective issue compiled after the fact so the record is complete. It was not sent to subscribers.

The interesting sandbox news this week came from the enterprise side, from Plaid, which quietly rebuilt the SDKs most fintech teams actually integrate against.

Sandbox is where you build a Plaid integration before you touch real accounts, so the tooling around it matters as much as the environment itself.

What moved

Plaid rebuilt its Android and React Native Link SDKs

On July 2 Plaid shipped an Android Link SDK rewritten in Kotlin and a React Native SDK rebuilt on Expo Modules, both moving to the session-based API design. The number that jumps out: the Android SDK footprint fell roughly 74%, from about 4.5 MB to about 1.2 MB. If you have been putting off a Link upgrade, this is the release that makes it worth the sprint.

Worth a click

Build in Sandbox, ship to Production. Eve

Sources: Plaid changelog ↗, Plaid Sandbox docs ↗

The Sandbox Brief

What moved in the sandbox world, every Friday.

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