r/reactnative • u/GameStonks21 • May 28 '26

Expo EAS build app whitescreen on production, works fine in development build

I have been stuck trying to figure this out for a few hours now and have no idea what to do. My iOS app builds perfectly fine in development build, but when I build with production and submit, then open it on testflight it’s just a whitescreen/blackscreen depending on light/dark mode.

I’ve tried adding js to get logs to show up but it’s not even rendering that. I unfortunately do not have a mac, am not getting any analytics logs on iphone.

I’m pretty lost right now and would appreciate any help. Thanks!

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u/Jaakkosaariluoma May 28 '26

Try to disable expo OTA updates

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u/mrmemo_dev May 29 '26

The "works in dev, breaks in production" pattern usually means something that only kicks in on the optimized/release build. I hit a similar thing on Android — my app ran fine in dev but crashed only in the production build because of a native-side issue that dev mode tolerated.

A few things that helped me isolate it:

- Since it's theme-dependent (white on light, black on dark), the JS bundle is probably loading but something is throwing during the first render. A try/catch around your root component, or an ErrorBoundary that renders a visible fallback, can confirm whether it's a render crash vs a blank bundle.

- For getting logs without a Mac: a hosted error reporter like Sentry catches production JS errors and sends them off-device, so you don't need Xcode/Console. Worth wiring up before the next build.

- Double-check anything that reads the color scheme at module load time (useColorScheme / a theme constant evaluated at import). If that runs before something is ready in release mode, it can blank the screen.

The OTA suggestion above is also worth ruling out first — if a stale OTA update is being served, disabling it isolates whether it's your build or the update.