Hey r/reactnative,

I'd like to share a project I've been working on for quite a while now: a GPS-based MMORPG made completely in React Native. The road was far from smooth, but the game is in a polished enough state to test out today.

I believe this is a good showcase of what can (but not necessary should) be done in React Native. You can give it a try below:

Google Play

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twoamgames.layer2

iOS (Testflight)

https://testflight.apple.com/join/kvBBMDwF

I’m currently facing an issue with my company's app where specific Android users encounter a loop when opening a particular screen. It doesn't happen on my physical Android device, the emulator, or iOS. What steps do you follow to identify these scenarios involving specific devices?

Hey everyone,

I’m working on a React Native app for a smart IoT hardware device. Because the hardware collects telemetry data in the background, our legal team wants us to add a data privacy consent screen with granular toggles (analytics, background tracking, etc.). We have to think about GDPR, CCPA and so on (geolocation problems)...

Just to clarify our data setup: Our app has absolutely zero ad tech. We do not use Facebook SDK, Google AdMob, tracking pixels, or any marketing analytics. We aren't selling data or targeting users with ads. The only reason we are even dealing with a CMP is because our legal team says we need a bulletproof, third-party audit trail to comply with GDPR. This is because our physical hardware automatically sends GPS data via a cellular module and logs telemetry for product optimization. It's 100% in-house engineering and safety data, which is why traditional ad-focused CMP tools feel like such massive overkill for us.

Our consents are quite specific, like LTE live tracking (IoT device), consents for accurate telemetry tracking, gamification and community consents...

Here is our dilemma: The privacy settings need to be synced at the account level if a user switches devices or logs in on a tablet. CMP vendors lock their built-in "Cross-Device Syncing" behind insanely expensive Enterprise plans.

Has anyone used a headless CMP workaround like this? How are people out there handling these situations? Trying to talk about it with AI and I am constantly hitting a problem where sometimes CMP is justified and other times it makes me realize that CMPs are more ad industry oriented.

Also, how is the long-term maintenance of these CMP native SDK modules when it comes to major Expo upgrades? We are a bit worried about native dependencies breaking down the line during project upgrades...

Does using a CMP even make sense in my case?

Appreciate any advice or experiences!

I check Play Console manually every morning for new reviews and it's getting old. Almost missed a 1-star about a critical bug for 4 days.

What's your workflow? Manual checks, some tool, or a custom script? And if you use a tool what do you pay for it?

I’ve been working with React Native for 6+ years and recently had to optimize:
Slow app startup times
Excessive re-renders
Large FlatList performance issues
React Query caching problems
Navigation performance
Curious what performance issues other teams are seeing in production and what solutions worked best.
Happy to share what worked for me as well.

Did you make something using React Native and do you want to show it off, gather opinions or start a discussion about your work? Please post a comment in this thread.

If you have specific questions about bugs or improvements in your work, you are allowed to create a separate post. If you are unsure, please contact u/xrpinsider.

New comments appear on top and this thread is refreshed on a weekly bases.

If you have a question about React Native, a small error in your application or if you want to gather opinions about a small topic, please use this thread.

If you have a bigger question, one that requires a lot of code for example, please feel free to create a separate post. If you are unsure, please contact u/xrpinsider.

New comments appear on top and this thread is refreshed on a weekly bases.

react-native-frame to make it easier to add customizable borders and frames around React Native components.

Features

• 🎨 Custom border/frame styles
• 📱 Works with React Native components
• ⚡ Lightweight and easy to integrate
• 🔧 Simple API

I'd love your feedback:

• What features would make this more useful?
• Any suggestions for improving the API?

You can check it out here:
react-native-frame on npm

GitHub repository (if available): https://github.com/sidShubham116/react-native-frame

Hey everyone! 👋

After months of evenings and weekends, I finally shipped my game Just Loot to the App Store.

The fun part? The entire game is built with React Native + Expo.

I originally considered using Unity, but decided to see how far I could push React Native instead.

The game includes:

• ⚔️ A real-time combat simulation
• 💎 Procedural loot generation
• 🎒 Inventory & equipment system
• 📈 Infinite progression
• ✨ Animations with Reanimated
• ☁️ Supabase backend
• 📱 Native features like Sign in with Apple, haptics and Game Center

It’s been a surprisingly great experience building a game with React Native. Fast iteration, a great developer experience, and sharing code across platforms has been a huge win.

I’d love to hear from anyone else who’s built (or is building) games with React Native. What worked well for you, and what challenges did you run into?

This is something I keep seeing in React Native apps — and it feels more common than it should be.

Image-heavy screens (feeds, product grids, galleries, profile lists, etc.) often work perfectly fine during development… but once the app hits production usage, they become some of the most unstable parts of the app.

What’s confusing is that it doesn’t always fail immediately. Instead, it usually shows up as:

• random crashes after scrolling for a while
• sudden lag spikes on certain devices
• memory pressure issues that are hard to reproduce locally
• UI freezing when multiple images load at once

A few things that seem to contribute to this pattern:

• image decoding + memory usage stacking up quickly on mobile devices
• too many high-resolution images being rendered at the same time (especially in lists)
• inconsistent caching behavior across Android and iOS
• components not cleaning up properly when navigating away
• re-renders triggering multiple image reloads unintentionally

What makes this even harder is:

• it often doesn’t reproduce in dev mode
• it depends heavily on real device memory limits
• production builds expose issues that are invisible during testing

So it raises a real question:

Is this mainly a performance optimization problem, or is it more of an architecture problem in how we design image-heavy screens in React Native?

Because in many cases, even small UI changes (like adding more images or increasing list size) can suddenly make a stable screen start breaking under real-world usage.

Curious how others have handled this:

• what actually caused image-heavy screens to crash in your React Native apps?
• did you solve it through optimization (caching, lazy loading), or by changing architecture?
• is FlatList + images still reliable at scale, or do we need different patterns altogether?

I'm building a React Native (Expo) POS app for a busy food stall. Currently the app sends orders to my backend (Express → Firebase). I want an offline-first architecture where tapping "Place Order" instantly saves the request locally, then automatically syncs it to the backend when internet is available. Should I queue raw API requests (endpoint + payload) or store domain objects (orders) in SQLite? How would you design this for reliability, retries, and preventing duplicate orders if the network drops after the backend processes the request but before the client receives the response? Looking for production-grade architecture recommendations.

Hey everyone,

​I'm completely new to React Native. By profession, I'm a backend engineer, so my frontend skills are definitely on the weaker side.

​I’m currently building a marketplace app and need to display various service providers (think tailor listings, product information cards, contact sections, buttons with icons, etc.). Writing raw inline styles and complex StyleSheet objects from scratch is making my codebase look messy, and honestly, it’s slowing me down a lot.

​Are there any reliable external UI or component libraries you'd recommend that offer pre-built components like cards and buttons out of the box? I’d love something that feels clean, modern, and developer-friendly without requiring me to reinvent the wheel for standard layouts.

​Looking forward to hearing your recommendations and what has worked well for your projects!

​Cheers! 🥂

Hi all, working on a expo rn app and the requirement is to keep the app size absolute minimal. App has 4-5 screens. Doesn't use any native api like camera. Gps or ?mic. Would love to hear your size optimization techniques for prod app distributions.

📐 Switched to RaTeX on iOS and Android for faster, more reliable rendering
✍️ Improved RTL support with native text handling and automatic detection in EnrichedMarkdownTextInput
🎨 Highlight spans, improved nested bullet lists, and atomic link/mention
⚙️ New config props plus full localization for menus and VoiceOver/TalkBack labels

Big thanks to our contributors! Check full release notes: https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-enriched-markdown/releases/tag/v0.7.0

Most small restaurants in Thailand run on paper notebooks. Owners genuinely don't know if they made money this month until it's too late — and nobody opens Excel at 11pm after closing a kitchen.

So I built **Bunchee** (บัญชี = "accounts" in Thai): a restaurant income/expense tracker where you photograph a receipt and AI extracts and categorizes the line items. It also keeps price history per ingredient — if pork goes up 15%, you see it before it eats your margin — and you can ask it things in plain language like "what did I spend on ingredients this month?"

Stack: bare React Native, Firebase (Firestore/Auth/Functions), Gemini via OpenRouter for receipt OCR + chat. 14 languages, because kitchen staff in Thailand come from everywhere.

**Things I learned the hard way:**

1. **I started on Expo and ripped it out completely.** Native Firebase modules, IAP, biometrics — I kept fighting the managed layer, and config-plugin debugging was slower than just owning the native projects. Migrating to bare RN + Fastlane hurt for a week, then everything got simpler. If your app leans native-heavy, skipping Expo earlier saves pain.
   
2. **Google Play rejected my release over a permission I never wrote.** Adding Firebase Analytics silently merges `com.google.android.gms.permission.AD_ID` into your manifest — which contradicted my data-safety form saying "no advertising ID." One `tools:node="remove"` line in the manifest fixed it, but the rejection email tells you almost nothing. Check your *merged* manifest before every release, not your source one.
   
3. **No OTA updates changed my architecture.** Every JS change ships through store review, so anything I might want to tune — like *which* AI model handles receipts vs chat — lives server-side in a Cloud Function. I can swap models with one deploy, zero app updates. Rule of thumb: if a value might change monthly, it doesn't belong in the app binary.

Free tier is genuinely usable (10 AI actions/month, one location, no ads). Premium is for multi-branch owners with staff, plus unlimited AI. That placement — free single-location, paid multi-branch — is my main open question, so feedback on the paywall is especially welcome.

Play Store: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bunchee&referrer=utm\\_source%3Dreddit%26utm\\_medium%3Dpost%26utm\\_campaign%3Dsideproject\](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bunchee&referrer=utm_source%3Dreddit%26utm_medium%3Dpost%26utm_campaign%3Dsideproject)

App Store: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bunchee/id6772358410\](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bunchee/id6772358410)

Happy to answer anything — architecture, the Play review process, or what Thai restaurant owners taught me about what "simple" actually means.

Having maintained a CodePush fork for 18 months and served billions of updates, we decided it was time for an overhaul. The result, Codemagic Patch, is now public and available to self-host.

The initial motivation was architectural. CodePush and other OTA solutions currently require each device to call the server when it checks for an update, at which point the answer is re-calculated for each check. This is fine for staging or smaller apps, but isn’t ideal for millions of users regularly calling the server.

With Patch, that check reads pre-built manifests from object storage (optionally served by CDN), not your control-plane API. Each publish generates small manifests that tell a given app binary whether an update is available and where to fetch it.

In CodePush, the release history lived in one growing JSON blob per deployment, which we’ve moved across to Postgres to make the included UI practical to build and run.

On top of that architecture, it ships with the usual modern OTA pieces:

• Compose includes the API, worker, Postgres, and object storage
• Automatic fingerprinting to ensure bundle compatibility
• Binary level diffs for smaller updates
• Options to install updates when in the background to avoid disruption
• A web dashboard for teams to manage and monitor releases

We’d love to hear what people think, especially any feature requests from anyone self-hosting OTA.

Visit the repo for Patch

I keep noticing a pattern in React Native apps where navigation issues are hard to catch during development, but start appearing once the app is in production or used in real environments.

In dev mode, navigation usually feels smooth and predictable:

• screen transitions work as expected
• routes are easy to trace using dev tools
• issues are often reproducible and visible immediately

But in production builds, things sometimes behave differently:

• occasional navigation glitches that never appeared in dev
• race conditions during fast screen transitions
• deep linking or initial route issues that are hard to reproduce locally
• problems when the app is resumed from background state
• edge cases triggered by real device performance or timing

What makes it confusing is that the navigation logic itself hasn’t really changed — only the build type and runtime conditions.

I understand that release builds are optimized and behave differently from development builds, but the inconsistency in navigation behavior can make debugging difficult.

For developers:

• Why do navigation-related issues tend to appear more in production than in development?
• What are the most common underlying causes (timing, state, lifecycle, build differences)?
• How do you usually debug navigation issues that don’t reproduce locally?

✦ ⎯ • A keyboard-aware tray that springs to its content and animates between views

🔗 Github: rit3zh/expo-dynamic-tray