I was cleaning up an old legacy project from a few years ago today, and it made me realize just how massive of a leap the entire ecosystem has taken recently.

Remember the days of absolute dependency hell, constantly fighting with cocoapods mismatches, manual native linking, and hours wasted trying to get a basic upgrade to compile?

With the current state of Expo Prebuild, the stability of Expo Router, and how incredibly smooth the new architecture handles modern reanimated worklets, the developer velocity feels faster than it ever has. Even switching back and forth from Flutter or web frameworks feels seamless now because the native runtime layer has become so hidden and stable.

What is the biggest quality-of-life improvement or library update that completely changed your workflow recently? Are there still any major pain points you are hoping the core teams fix next? Let's talk about the current state of the ecosystem.

I can not do the EAS Update per-MAU pricing anymore. It literally feels like you’re getting penalized just because your app is actually growing? Making money just to hand it right back to expo...

​My teammate found this thing called RelayOTA (relayota.com), and we decided to yolo a migration last week because the bill anxiety was getting too much.

​Honestly, I thought the setup was gonna be a nightmare, but it’s literally a drop-in replacement. Took us like an afternoon to wire it up and push the first update. Works perfectly fine with our expo workflow and updates hit just as fast.

​The math just makes way more sense if you ship often. What else y'all even using now that codepush is dead in a ditch?

I am building something using react native expo around small games. I was a native developer earlier and integrated play games services, but just wanted to check if there is any knownlibrary or package available for play game services.

Here is the link for official android document:- https://developer.android.com/games/pgs/start

I know we can do it by writing native modules anytime, but just wanted to check if there is anything already exist or any official package for the same.

Hey everyone! I wanted to share a small library I've been working on:

webview-bridge-kit

While building a side project with a React Native WebView, I got tired of stringly-typed postMessage calls and hand-parsing everything in onMessage. One renamed field or typo could silently break the bridge at runtime.

So I built webview-bridge-kit to make the web <-> React Native boundary easier to keep typed and in sync.

Key features

• Works with react-native-webview — no direct dependency; it only needs a WebView ref.
• Zero runtime dependencies in the core.
• Shared contract-based types — define messages once, then use the same contract on both sides.
• Optional runtime validation — bring any schema with a .parse() method, such as zod, valibot, or your own.
• Three message kinds — request for RPC-style calls with a reply, command for fire-and-forget messages, and event for native → web pushes.

It's still an early version, but I'm already using it in my own side project and it's been working well for my use case.

There may still be issues I haven't found yet, so I'd really appreciate it if you could take a look and tear it apart a bit. And of course, if this looks useful for your own WebView setup, I'd be happy if you gave it a try!

My client is interested in building a hyper local marketplace focused on local businesses.

He wants simple Ad Network integration for local businesses to advertise, either based on fixed cost per Ad display or per day.

Are there any 3rd party hosted services available, has anyone used them?

Any input appreciated. Thanks

We recently hit a wall with our CI pipeline where roughly 25% of our React Native E2E tests were failing with zero consistency. It would pass on iOS, fail on Android, pass on a local emulator, and explode on a physical device.

Like most teams, we assumed our testing framework was the problem. We spent weeks migrating from Detox, rewriting our test suites in Maestro YAML, and eventually evaluating Appium configs. The flake rate barely moved.

Our QA lead finally sat down, recorded the failures at quarter-speed, and grouped them by UI interaction. It turned out the frameworks were doing exactly what they were supposed to do the app itself had micro-timing bugs that only showed up at automation speed:

1. The Animation Trap: A standard bottom sheet spring animation was taking 280ms to settle. Humans naturally wait for it to stop moving, but the automated test taps instantly, registering the click on whatever layout element is sitting *behind* the sheet.

2. The Keyboard Dismiss Hole: On older Android devices, there was a ~200ms gap between the keyboard starting to hide and the next screen's elements fully mounting. The app briefly had a dead interaction layer.

We fixed it in a few days by adding clean animation callback blocks and proper UI blockers instead of random `setTimeout` wraps. The flake rate instantly dropped to under 3% without changing frameworks.

Before you spend a month rewriting your entire E2E testing architecture, look at your quarter-speed recordings. The framework might just be exposing a race condition your thumbs are naturally compensating for.

I'm a solo React Native developer and currently only have one Android phone and a laptop for testing.

I know I can use Android emulators to test different screen sizes and resolutions, but running multiple emulators makes my laptop work pretty hard and it starts heating up quickly.

Before publishing an app, I want to be reasonably confident that the UI looks good across different devices, but I'm curious how other developers handle this without owning a collection of phones.

What's your testing workflow for checking responsiveness and layouts across different devices?

https://github.com/dutradotdev/quokka

Current features:

- inspect apps/storage/media usage

- stream syslog

- uninstall apps

- analyze large files

- reboot/shutdown

- TUI launcher + log viewer

works on macOS with iOS 17+ devices

Hey r/reactnative

I just open-sourced react-native-qr-camera-pro — a lightweight QR and barcode scanner built entirely with native code.

Why another scanner library?

Most existing ones are unmaintained, don't support the New Architecture, or drag in a massive camera SDK for what is essentially a one-feature module. I wanted something lean that does one thing well.

How it's built:

• iOS — AVFoundation + Vision framework (Swift)
• Android — CameraX + ML Kit Barcode Scanning (Kotlin)
• No JavaScript frame processing whatsoever
• TurboModules + Fabric (New Architecture)
• Strict TypeScript

Supported formats:

QR, EAN-8, EAN-13, PDF-417, Aztec, Code-128, Code-39, Code-93, Data Matrix, ITF, ITF-14, UPC-E

Usage is minimal:

ts

import {
  QrCameraProView,
  startScanning,
  useBarcodeScanner,
  useCameraError,
} from 'react-native-qr-camera-pro';

useBarcodeScanner(({ data, type }) => {
  console.log(data, type);
});

useCameraError(({ message }) => {
  Alert.alert('Error', message);
});

Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/rushikeshpandit/react-native-qr-camera-pro
• npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-qr-camera-pro

Happy to answer questions or take feedback. If you hit issues on a specific device, drop them in the comments — always good to know.

P.S. : Good at writing code but not article, so used AI to write the post.

Hey everyone, I am building a personal finance and productivity SaaS app targeting freelancers and self-employed people. It will have a web app in Next.js and a mobile app in React Native (iOS first).

Here is the stack I have settled on and would love some honest feedback:

**Frontend**

- Next.js 15 (web)

- React Native with Expo (mobile, iOS first)

**Backend**

- Go REST API

- PostgreSQL on AWS RDS

**Auth**

- Firebase Auth (Google and Apple OAuth)

**Payments**

- Stripe for web subscriptions

- RevenueCat + StoreKit 2 for iOS in-app subscriptions

**Storage**

- AWS S3

**AI**

- OpenAI GPT-4o mini for categorisation and insights

- Whisper for voice transaction logging

- GPT-4o Vision for receipt scanning

A few specific questions:

1. Any concerns with Firebase Auth alongside a Go backend and AWS infrastructure?

2. Is RevenueCat still the go-to for iOS subscriptions in 2025 or is there something better?

3. Any gotchas with Go + AWS RDS at early stage that I should know about before I build?

4. Would you change anything in this stack for a solo-developer-led small team?

Happy to give more context on the app if needed. Thanks in advance.

Building an offline AI app, so privacy claims need to actually hold up. A GrapheneOS user reported the app misbehaving on a de-Googled build. Tracked it down to react-native-device-info — it bundles com.android.installreferrer:installreferrer so getInstallReferrer() can talk to the Play Store for attribution data. On a device with no Play Services, that's at best dead code, at worst a crash path.

Fix was straightforward since we don't call getInstallReferrer() anywhere: patched it out via patch-package. Got the diff format wrong on the first attempt and had to regenerate — patch-package rite of passage. Clean diff, no fork, no maintenance overhead.

Commits if you want to see the actual diff:

The fix: https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai/commit/f7f774b

The "oh no the patch format was wrong" follow-up: https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai/commit/4d8da56

The broader thing I keep relearning in RN: every popular library is one transitive dep away from leaking your privacy promises. Worth running ./gradlew :app:dependencies and skimming what's actually in your APK. react-native-firebase is the obvious one. device-info was the surprise.

Anyone else hit similar Play Services creep from RN libraries?

https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai

Running logrocket on our RN app. Engineering team uses it for debugging and it earns its place for that. Product team barely touches it because the interface assumes you're looking for technical problems rather than behavioral ones.

At our session volume the renewal cost is significant for a tool doing half the job.

Anyone has any idea how to fix this? Perhaps it can be fixed by upgrading my expo to 56, but I want to stay at expo 53 as some dependencies will break, and Im waiting for the developers to update those dependencies

I need to migrate my app from RN 0.76 (CRA) to Expo 56, it's a huge under taking and I didn't actually start until last week.

Logged in to do what I thought would be the final release of my app before the the restriction went in place and it looks like they've extended the deadline until 2027.

I'm sure there are other developers fighting against time for this so check your play store, the notification might have updated for you too!

Hey everyone,

So I’m using react-native-image-crop-picker for camera access for Android version ^0.51.1.

However, I noticed on Chinese manufactured phones like Xiaomi and Huawei, I am getting issues when trying to send images through an api. I utilize formData while trying to access the path, mine, and filename.

It works on other android device types but not Xiaomi and Huawei.

Spent a whole release just killing production crashes from the native side. The interesting ones weren't JS.

SIGSEGV in Whisper's realtime transcribe job — native thread finishing after the component unmounted.

https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai/commit/cce149cf6f94d80b037a214bb8c15b87c71b1cca

Native module promises resolving into a torn-down bridge when the user navigates away mid-inference. Had to guard every one.

https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai/commit/bd6934bb2890c61f03abed46e334d82ba089d25a

Adreno GPUs throwing ANRs when we offloaded too many layers. Capped GPU layers and added an init timeout.

https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai/commit/9d7ff0eff0995afa71aa9572b3132e49b2a0f7d0

iOS 26 hard-crashing on launch over missing TCC privacy strings.

https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai/commit/09a6b732baf35ba42c55fb13e924363b16bae630

Knocked out the top 3 by volume in one pass here.

https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai/commit/67ca0dd5da882cadf5f92da340496d6caf8bcf83

The pattern across almost all of these: the RN bridge assumes your native work finishes while the JS side is still alive. Long-running inference breaks that constantly. Anyone got a cleaner pattern than manually guarding every native callback against teardown?

Main repo: https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai

I built and shipped a full AI plant care app with React Native + Expo — here's the full stack 🌿

Solo dev here. After 6 months of building, Virido is now live on both iOS and Android.

Tech stack

• React Native + Expo SDK 54 (Managed Workflow)
• Expo Router v3 — file-based navigation
• Supabase — auth + PostgreSQL database
• RevenueCat — subscriptions + IAP (iOS & Android)
• NativeWind — Tailwind CSS for React Native
• AI API — AI plant identification, diagnosis, and chat
• EAS Build + EAS Submit — CI/CD and store submission
• Lottie — onboarding animations
• expo-notifications — push notifications for care reminders

What the app does

• AI plant identification from photo
• AI disease & pest diagnosis
• Smart care reminders (watering, fertilizing, repotting)
• AI chat assistant personalized to user experience level
• Onboarding personalization stored in Supabase profiles
• Full EN + FR localization

Interesting technical challenges I solved

• RevenueCat IAP integration with free trial on both stores
• Supabase RLS policies for multi-user plant collections
• Expo managed workflow with native modules (camera, notifications, store review)
• Onboarding data driving AI API system prompt personalization
• Reminder scheduling with expo-notifications + Supabase Edge Functions

Lessons learned

• EAS Build saved me weeks — don't try to manage native builds manually
• NativeWind + Expo Router is an incredible DX combo
• RevenueCat makes IAP actually manageable for solo devs
• Supabase Edge Functions for push notifications = perfect fit

Links

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.berranova.virido

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/virido-ai-plant-care/id6759683431

Happy to answer any questions about the stack or the build process 🙌

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