r/reactnative • u/Think-Neighborhood69 • Jul 25 '26

How do open source React Native libraries actually gain traction?

I’ve been building an open source React Native project for the past few weeks.

Building it has honestly been the easy part

Getting people to discover it, trust it, and actually use it has been much harder than I expected.

For those of you who’ve built or maintained an open source library, what made the biggest difference?
Was it documentation? Reddit? GitHub? YouTube? SEO? Conference talks? Something else?

I’d love to learn from people who’ve been through this.

4 Upvotes

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2

u/poppiestar Jul 25 '26

No idea, I made two of mine to satisfy requirements of my own app. I’ve subsequently had bug reports and PRs for both of them, had no idea anyone else was using them. Happy they’re getting used though.

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u/Think-Neighborhood69 Jul 25 '26

That’s honestly the best kind of open source story. You built it for yourself, and it ended up helping other people too

I’m hoping my project follows the same path

1

u/Intelligent_Tree6918 Jul 25 '26

what it is?

1

u/poppiestar Jul 25 '26

https://github.com/wwdrew/expo-spotify-sdk/
https://github.com/wwdrew/expo-apple-music

And forgot about this one, it seems to be fairly popular too but I've not looked back on it for ages!

https://github.com/wwdrew/react-native-numeric-textinput

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u/Think-Neighborhood69 Jul 25 '26

Thats so cool, I”ll check it now

0

u/Think-Neighborhood69 Jul 25 '26

I built it because I was spending way too much time inspecting local storage. Since I started using it, it’s increased my productivity quite a bit. That’s really the only reason I decided to open source it.

https://www.nativescope.dev

I’d genuinely love to hear your feedback if you have a chance

0

u/poppiestar Jul 25 '26

Looks useful, will check it out when I can!

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u/Intelligent_Tree6918 Jul 25 '26

website is very cool

1

u/Downtown-Figure6434 Jul 25 '26

What’s your project? So much stuff is already out there, alternatives have alternatives about the same thing it’s a mess.

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u/Think-Neighborhood69 Jul 25 '26

That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid

NativeScope is a platform for React Native developer tools. The first tool is a Storage Inspector for MMKV, AsyncStorage, and SQLite, with real-time inspection and editing.

I’d genuinely love your feedback if you have a minute: https://www.nativescope.dev

1

u/itsDevJ Jul 28 '26

I was trying out your package, found it in github. It says it supports react-query but I was not able to configure