The Ultimate Guide

to React Native
Optimization
2023 Edition
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Table of Contents
How this Guide is organized 3
Introduction toReact Nativeoptimization  6

Part one
Pay attention to UI re-renders  10
Use dedicated components for certain layouts  26
Think twice before you pick anexternal library  36
Always remember to use libraries dedicated to the mobile platform  42
Find the balance between native and JavaScript  48
Animate at 60FPS - no matter what  56
Replace Lottiewith Rive  67
Optimize your app’s JavaScript bundle  76

Part Two
Always run the latest React Native version to access the new features  83
How to debug faster and better with Flipper  94
Avoid unusednative dependencies  100
Optimize yourapplication startup time with Hermes  106
Optimize yourAndroid application’s size with these Gradle settings  114
Experiment withthe New Architectureof React Native  121

Part Three
Run tests for key pieces of your app  133
Have a workingContinuousIntegration (CI)in place  144
Don’t be afraid to ship fast with ContinuousDeployment  151
Ship OTA(Over-The-Air) whenin an emergency  162
Make your app consistently fast  171
Know how to profile iOS  185
Know how to profile Android  193

Thank you  204

Authors205
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

How This Guide Is Organized

Optimizing the React Native app is a complex process
where you need to take various aspects into account
– from implementation through using the latest React
Native features to testing and continuous deployment.
This guide is a comprehensive source of tactics, tricks, tips, tools, and
best practices to help you deliver an optimized React Native app.

We not only focus on the technological aspects of React Native opti-

mization. We also underline the impact of each technological aspect
on business continuity.

This guide contains best practices for optimizing:

• Stability
• Performance
• Resource usage
• User experience
• Maintenance costs
• Time-to-market

All these aforementioned aspects have a particular impact on the rev-

enue-generating effectiveness of your apps. Such elements as stabil-
ity, performance, and resource usage are directly related to improving
the ROI of your products because of their positive impact on the user
experience.

With a faster time-to-market, you can stay ahead of your competitors,

whereas an easier and quicker maintenance process will help you re-
duce your spending on that particular process.
Organizational part The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

What this guide looks like

and the topics it covers
This guide is divided into three parts:
The first part is about improving performance through understanding
the React Native implementation details and knowing how to maximize
them. This part covers the following topics:

1. Pay attention to UI re-renders

2. Use dedicated components for certain layouts
3. Think twice before you pick an external library
4. Always remember to use libraries dedicated to the mobile platform
5. Find the balance between native and JavaScript
6. Animate at 60FPS - no matter what
7. Replace Lottie with Rive
8. Optimize your app’s JavaScript bundle

The second part is about improving performance by using the latest

React Native features or turning some of them on. This part describes
the following topics:

1. Always run the latest React Native version to access the latest
features
2. How to debug faster and better with Flipper
3. Avoid unused native dependencies
4. Optimize your Android application startup time with Hermes
5. Optimize your Android application’s size with Gradle settings
6. Experiment with the New Architecture of React Native

4
Organizational part The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

The third part is about enhancing the stability of the application by

investing in testing and continuous deployment. This part tackles the
following topics:

1. Run tests for key pieces of your app

2. Have a working Continuous Integration (CI) in place
3. Don’t be afraid to ship fast with Continuous Deployment
4. Ship OTA (Over-the-Air) in an emergency
5. Make your app consistently fast
6. Know how to profile iOS
7. Know how to profile Android

The structure of each section looks like this:

Issue
This part describes the main problem with React Native performance.

Solution
This part outlines how that problem may affect your business and what
the best practices are to solve it.

Benefits
This part focuses on the business benefits of our proposed solution.

5
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Introduction to
React Native
Optimization
Introduction The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

React Native takes care of the

rendering. But performance is still key.
With React Native, you create components that describe how your inter-
face should look like. During the runtime, React Native turns them into
platform-specific native components. Rather than talking directly to the
underlying APIs, you focus on the user experience of your application.

However, that doesn’t mean all the applications developed with React
Native are equally fast and offer the same level of user experience.

Every declarative approach (including React Native) is

built with imperative APIs. And you have to be careful
when doing things imperatively.
When you’re building your application the imperative way, you carefully
analyze every callsite to the external APIs. For example, when working
in a multi-threaded environment, you safely write your code in a thread,
being aware of the context and resources that the code is looking for.

Despite all the differences between the declarative and imperative

ways of doing things, they have a lot in common. Every declarative
abstraction can be broken down into a number of imperative calls. For
example, React Native uses the same APIs to render your application
on iOS as native developers would use themselves.

React Native unifies performance but doesn’t make it

fast out of the box!
While you don’t have to worry about the performance of the underlying
iOS and Android APIs calls, how you compose the components can
make all the difference. All your components will offer the same level
of performance and responsiveness.

7
Introduction The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

But is “same” a synonym for “best”? It’s not.

That’s when our checklist comes into play. Use React Native to its full
potential. As discussed before, React Native is a declarative framework
and takes care of rendering the application for you. In other words, you
don’t dictate how the application will be rendered.

Your job is to define the UI components and forget about the rest. How-
ever, that doesn’t mean that you should take the performance of your
application for granted. In order to create fast and responsive applica-
tions, you have to think the React Native way. You have to understand
how the framework interacts with the underlying platform APIs.

If you need help with performance,

stability, user experience, or other
complex issues - contact us!
As React Native Core Contributors and leaders of the
community, we will be happy to help.

8
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

PA RT 1

Improve performance by
understanding the details
of React Native implementation.
In this section, we will dive deeper into the most popular performance
bottlenecks and the React Native implementation details that contrib-
ute to them. This will not only be a smooth introduction to some of
the advanced React Native concepts, but it will also let you improve
the stability and performance of your application by performing small
tweaks and changes.

The following part is focused on the first point from the checklist of
performance optimization tactics: UI re-renders. It’s a very important
part of the React Native optimization process because it allows for the
reduction of the device’s battery usage which translates into a better
user experience for your app.
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

PA RT 1 | C H A P T E R 1

Pay attention
to UI re-renders
Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Optimize the number of state

operations and remember about
memoized components to make
your app work faster with fewer
resources.
Issue: Incorrect state updates cause extraneous render-
ing cycles or the device is just too slow.
As discussed briefly, React Native takes care of rendering the appli-
cation for you. You have to define all the components you need and
compose the final interface out of these smaller building blocks. In that
approach, you don’t control the application rendering lifecycle.

In other words, when and how to repaint things on screen is purely React
Native’s responsibility. React looks out for the changes you have done
to your components, compares them, and, by design, only performs
the required and smallest number of actual updates.

Diff

Model
Patch

Diff

Virtual DOM DOM

11
Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

By default, a component can re-render if its parent is re-rendering or the

props are different. This means that your component’s render method
can sometimes run, even if their props didn’t change. This is an ac-
ceptable tradeoff in most scenarios, as comparing the two objects
(the previous and current props) would take longer.

Negative impact on performance, UI flicker, and FPS

decrease
While the above heuristics are correct most of the time, performing
too many operations can cause performance problems, especially on
low-end mobile devices.

As a result, you may observe your UI flickering (when the updates are
performed) or frames dropping (while there’s an animation happening
and an update is coming along).

Note: Performing premature optimizations may have a

counter-positive effect. Try looking at performance is-
sues as soon as you spot dropped frames or undesired
performance within your app.
As soon as you see any of these symptoms, it is the right time to look
a bit deeper into your application lifecycle and look for extraneous
operations that you would not expect to happen.

How do we know what to optimize?

When it comes to performance optimization, we want to make deci-
sions based on data. The data comes from measuring performance
using specialized tools. The process is often referred to as profiling.
There are many tools available that can help us with profiling our React
Native apps: react-devtools, why-did-you-render, Profiler, and others.
For this exercise, we’ll use Flipper, a platform for debugging iOS, An-
droid, and React Native apps. It has React DevTools Profiler integrated
as a plugin that can produce a flame graph of the React rendering
pipeline as a result of profiling. We can leverage this data to measure

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

the re-rendering issues of the app. Once you’ve downloaded Flipper,

select React DevTools:

Here is the code we’re about to profile:

import React, { useEffect, useState } from 'react';

import { View } from 'react-native';

const App = () => {

const [value, setValue] = useState('');
const backgroundStyle = {
backgroundColor: '#fff',
flex: 1,
marginTop: 80,
};

useEffect(() => {
setTimeout(() => {
setValue('update 1');
}, 3000);
setTimeout(() => {
setValue('update 2');
}, 5000);
}, []);

return (
<View style={backgroundStyle}>
<ColoredView />
</View>
);
};

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

const ColoredView = () => {

const style = { backgroundColor: 'red', padding: 10 };

return <View style={style} />;

};

export default App;

In the Flipper app, make sure the “Record why each component ren-
dered while profiling” option is enabled in the settings icon and hit the
round blue button to start profiling. After around 5 seconds, hit the round
red button to stop profiling. Your profile will look something like this:

This profile shows us how much time a certain component took to

render, how many times it re-rendered, and what was the cause of it. In
our case, ColoredView rendered 2 times due to the parent component
being re-rendered. This might give us a hint that there's an unexpected
performance implication of the code associated with ColoredView. Us-
ing this knowledge, we can apply tailored solutions to avoid the extra
re-renders.

Taking a look at the performance flame graph for the first time may be
slightly intimidating. To understand React DevTools more in-depth, this
video from Ben Awad is good at explaining it. Don’t forget to watch this
talk by Alex at React Native EU, which explains how we can use flame
graph to identify and fix the issues. Also, visit the official react website
for detailed information on React Profiler.

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Solution: Optimize the number of state operations

and remember to use memoized components
when needed.
There’re a lot of ways your application can turn into unnecessary ren-
dering cycles and that point itself is worth a separate article. Here, we
will focus on two common scenarios - using a controlled component,
such as TextInput and global state.

Controlled vs uncontrolled components

Let’s start with the first one. Almost every React Native application
contains at least one TextInput that is controlled by the component
state as per the following snippet:

import React, { useState } from 'react';

import { TextInput, StyleSheet } from 'react-native';

const UselessTextInput = () => {

const [value, setValue] = useState('Text');

const onChangeText = (text) => {

setValue(text);
};

return (
<TextInput
accessibilityLabel="Text input field"
style={styles.textInput}
onChangeText={onChangeText}
value={value}
/>
);
};

const styles = StyleSheet.create({

textInput: {
height: 40,
borderColor: 'gray',
borderWidth: 1,
},
});

export default UselessTextInput;

Read more: https://snack.expo.dev/@callstack-snack/textinput-example

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

The above code sample will work in most cases. However, on slow
devices, and in situations where the user is typing really fast, it may
cause a problem with the view updates.

This problem is caused by React Native’s asynchronous nature. To

better understand what is going on here, let’s first take a look at the
order of standard operations that occur while the user is typing and
populating your <TextInput /> with new characters.

Diagram that shows what happens while typing TEST

As soon as the user starts inputting a new character into the native
input, an update is sent to React Native via the onChangeText prop (op-
eration 1 on the above diagram). React processes that information and
updates its state accordingly by calling setState. Next, a controlled
component synchronizes its JavaScript value with the native compo-
nent value (operation 2 on the above diagram).

There are benefits to such an approach. React is a source of truth that

dictates the value of your inputs. This technique lets you alter the user
input as it happens, by e.g. performing a validation, masking it, or com-
pletely modifying it.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned approach, while ultimately cleaner
and more compliant with the way React works, has one downside and
it is most noticeable when there are limited resources available and/
or the user is typing at a very high rate.

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Diagram that shows what happens while typing TEST too fast

When the updates via onChangeText arrive before React Native syn-
chronized each of them back, the interface will start flickering. The
first update (operation 1 and operation 2) performs without issues as
the user starts typing T.

Next, operation 3 arrives, followed by operation 4. The user typed E &

S while React Native was busy doing something else, delaying the syn-
chronization of the letter E (operation 5). As a result, the native input
will temporarily change its value back from TES to TE.

Now, the user was typing fast enough to actually enter another char-
acter when the value of the text input was set to TE for a second. As a
result, another update arrived (operation 6), with the value of TET. This
wasn’t intentional - the user wasn’t expecting the value of its input to
change from TES to TE.

Finally, operation 7 synchronized the input back to the correct input

received from the user a few characters before (operation 4 informed
us about TES). Unfortunately, it was quickly overwritten by another
update (operation 8), which synchronized the value to TET - the final
value of the input.

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

The root cause of this situation lies in the order of operations. If opera-
tion 5 was executed before operation 4, things would have run smoothly.
Also, if the user didn’t type T when the value was TE instead of TES, the
interface would flicker but the input value would remain correct.

One of the solutions for the synchronization problem is to remove the

value prop from TextInput entirely. As a result, the data will flow only
one way, from the native to the JavaScript side, eliminating the syn-
chronization issues that were described earlier.

import React, { useState } from 'react';

import { Text, TextInput, View, StyleSheet } from 'react-
native';

const PizzaTranslator = () => {

const [value, setValue] = useState('');

const onChangeText = (text) => {

setValue(text);
};

return (
<View style={styles.container}>
<TextInput
accessibilityLabel="Text input field"
placeholder="Type here to translate!"
onChangeText={onChangeText}
defaultValue={value}
style={styles.textInput}
/>
<Text style={styles.label}>
{value
.split(' ')
🍕
.map((word) => word && ' ')
.join(' ')}
</Text>
</View>
);
};

export default PizzaTranslator;

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
container: {
padding: 10,
},
textInput: {
height: 40,

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

},
label: {
padding: 10,
fontSize: 42,
},
});

Read more: https://snack.expo.dev/@callstack-snack/handling-text-input

However, as pointed out by @nparashuram in his YouTube video (which

is a great resource to learn more about React Native performance),
that workaround alone isn’t enough in some cases. For example, when
performing an input validation or masking, you still need to control the
data that the user is typing and alter what ends up being displayed
within TextInput.

Global state
Another common reason for performance issues is how components
are dependent on the application's global state. The worst case scenario
is when the state change of a single control like TextInput or CheckBox
propagates the render of the whole application. The reason for this is
a bad global state management design.

We recommend using specialized libraries like Redux or Overmind.js

to handle your state management in a more optimized way.

First, your state management library should take care of updating com-
ponents only when a defined subset of data had changed - this is the
default behavior of the redux connect function.

Second, if your component uses data in a different shape than what

is stored in your state, it may re-render, even if there is no real data
change. To avoid this situation, you can implement a selector that
would memorize the result of the derivation until the set of passed
dependencies changes.

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

import { createSelector } from 'reselect';

const getVisibilityFilter = (state) => state.visibilityFilter;

const getTodos = (state) => state.todos;

const getVisibleTodos = createSelector(

[getVisibilityFilter, getTodos],
(visibilityFilter, todos) => {
switch (visibilityFilter) {
case 'SHOW_ALL':
return todos;
case 'SHOW_COMPLETED':
return todos.filter((t) => t.completed);
case 'SHOW_ACTIVE':
return todos.filter((t) => !t.completed);
default:
return todos;
}
},
);

const mapStateToProps = (state) => ({

todos: getVisibleTodos(state),
});

const VisibleTodoList = connect(mapStateToProps)(TodoList);

export default VisibleTodoList;

A typical example of selectors with redux state management library

A common bad performance practice is the belief that a state man-

agement library can be replaced by using a custom implementation
based on React Context. It may be handy at the beginning because it
reduces the boilerplate code that state management libraries introduce.
But using it without proper memoization will lead to huge performance
drawbacks. You will probably end up refactoring state management to
Redux, because it will turn out that it is easier than the implementation
of custom selectors to your current solution.

You can also optimize your application on a single component level.

Using React.memo or React.useMemo will likely save you a lot of re-ren-
ders - the React Profiler can tell you precisely how many. Try not to
implement these techniques in advance, because it may be premature
optimization. In rare cases, memoization can lead to the app being less

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

performant due to increased memory usage. Which is impossible to

measure with JS tooling. Always make sure to profile the “before” and
“after” of your changes to have certainty it makes the app faster.

Atomic State
The pattern of a single store - a top-down mental model - as initially
promoted by Redux is moving towards a more atomic design.

Why is it moving away from a single store?

• It’s often overkill for some apps.
• It’s too verbose.
• You end up using memoization techniques to avoid re-renders.
• Top-down is straightforward but leads to poor performance.
• More states are needed when the app grows, and each has its own
problems and sub-states, such as handling local UI states (loadings,
errors, messages, etc).

If you don’t pay attention to the Redux store, it tends to absorb all the
states, leading to a monolithic structure that’s quite hard to reason with.
The top-down build places most of the states at the top of the compo-
nent; because of this, a state update from a parent component could
produce re-renders to its children. Ideally, if possible, the state should
be local to the component so it can be reused - this means building
from the bottom-up.

To start thinking about this bottom-up pattern, we want to build from

the smaller components, often called atoms. We don’t build the com-
ponent starting from the parent (or “root” container element), we need
to look at all the elements that make up the component. We then have
to start from the atom and add the right state action, if needed.

Let’s say we have a TODO list with some filters: “show all”, “just the
active ones”, or “just the completed ones”. We identify the top compo-
nent, the TodoList, but we don’t start here. We first identify the children
and start building those smaller components, so that later we can mix

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

them and build a complex element. We need to make some data visible
in one component which will be managed by another one. To avoid a
parent state and passing down the data and actions (top-down), we are
going to use a state manager. This state manager will be in charge of
storing the data, making it accessible, and providing actions/modifiers,
because we are moving to a bottom-up approach. We are going to use
some libraries that will help us.

Zustand
Zustand is often used as a top-down pattern but given the simplicity and
unopinionated library, we can use it to build a component bottom-up.

Store
We create the obj where the filter will be and the modifiers will be
exposed:

export const useHomeStore = create((set) => ({

filter: filterType.all,
showAll: () => set({ filter: filterType.all }),
showOnlyCompleted: () => set({ filter: filterType.completed
}),
showOnlyActive: () => set({ filter: filterType.active }),
}));

Show all filter button

Here we update the ticket and this item so any children won’t suffer a
re-render:

const ShowAllItem = () => {

const showAll = useHomeStore((state) => state.showAll);
return <Menu.Item onPress={showAll} title="Show All" />;
};

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Todo item
Here because we are looking at a filter, TodoItemList will only re-render
when it changes.

export const TodoItemList = ({ item }) => {

const filter = useHomeStore((state) => state.filter);
if (!shouldBeShown(filter, item.done)) {
return null;
}

return (
<View>
<Text>{item.title}</Text>
<Text>{item.description}</Text>
</View>
);
};

Jotai
Jotai was built with this bottom-up approach in mind, so its syntax is
minimal and simple. Using the concept of atom as a “store” then you
use different hooks to make the atom readonly or mutable.

Store
We use useAtomValue to read the filter value and useSetAtom to set a
new value. This is especially useful when performance is a concern.

const filter = atom(filterType.all);

export const useCurrentFilter = () => useAtomValue(filter);

export const useUpdateFilter = () => useSetAtom(filter);

FilterMenuItem

const FilterMenuItem = ({ title, filterType }) => {

const setUpdateFilter = useUpdateFilter();
const handleShowAll = () => setUpdateFilter(filterType);

return <Menu.Item onPress={handleShowAll} title={title} />;

};

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

TodoItem

export const TodoItemList = ({ item }) => {

const filter = useCurrentFilter();

if (!shouldBeShown(filter, item.done)) {
return null;
}

return (
<View>
<Text>{item.title}</Text>
<Text>{item.description}</Text>
</View>
);
};

Using this bottom-up approach, we can prevent state changes on the

parent component, and produce re-renders to its children. In addition,
it often leads to less overuse of memoization.

Benefits: Fewer resources needed and a faster

application.
You should always keep the performance of your app in the back of
your head. Beware of optimizing too fast. Some say that premature
optimization is the root of all evil. They’re not entirely correct, but also
not entirely wrong. Premature memoization may lead to more memory
usage and provide only a fraction of improvement compared to the ef-
fort taken. That’s why measuring and identifying impactful problems
to tackle is so important.

Most hard-to-solve performance issues are caused by bad architec-

tural decisions around state management. Different libraries juggle
different sets of tradeoffs. Make sure you and your team understand
them and pick the tool you’re most productive with. For some, it may
be the verbosity of Redux. But others may prefer the ease of Zustand
that avoids having to think about extra re-renders.

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Pay attention to UI re-renders The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

With all these steps in mind, your application should perform fewer
operations and need smaller resources to complete its job. As a result,
this should lead to lower battery usage and more satisfaction from
interacting with the interface.

25
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

PA RT 1 | C H A P T E R 2

Use dedicated
components for
certain layouts
Use dedicated components for certain layouts The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Find out how to use dedicated

higher-ordered React Native compo-
nents to improve the user experience
and the performance of your apps
Issue: You are unaware of the higher-order components
that are provided with React Native.
In a React Native application, everything is a component. At the end
of the component hierarchy, there are so-called primitive components,
such as Text, View, or TextInput. These components are implemented
by React Native and provided by the platform you are targeting to sup-
port the most basic user interactions.

When we’re building our application, we compose it out of smaller

building blocks. To do so, we use primitive components. For example,
in order to create a login screen, we would use a series of TextInput
components to register user details and a Touchable component to
handle user interaction. This approach is true from the very first com-
ponent that we create within our application and holds true through the
final stage of its development.

On top of primitive components, React Native ships with a set of high-

er-order components that are designed and optimized to serve a cer-
tain purpose. Being unaware of them or not using them can potentially
affect your application performance, especially as you populate your
state with real production data. A bad performance of your app may
seriously harm the user experience. In consequence, it can make your
clients unsatisfied with your product and turn them towards your com-
petitors.

Not using specialized components will affect your

performance and UX as your data grows.

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Use dedicated components for certain layouts The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

If you’re not using specialized components, you are opting out of per-
formance improvements and risking a degraded user experience when
your application enters production. It is worth noting that certain issues
remain unnoticed while the application is developed, as mocked data
is usually small and doesn’t reflect the size of a production database.
Specialized components are more comprehensive and have a broader
API to cover than the vast majority of mobile scenarios.

Solution: Always use a specialized component, e.g.

FlatList for lists.
Let’s take long lists as an example. Every application contains a list at
some point. The fastest and dirtiest way to create a list of elements
would be to combine ScrollView and View primitive components.
However, such an example would quickly become problematic when
the data grows. Dealing with large data-sets, infinite scrolling, and
memory management was the motivation behind FlatList - a dedi-
cated component in React Native for displaying and working with data
structures like this.

Compare the performance of adding a new list element based on

ScrollView

import React, { useCallback, useState } from 'react';

import { ScrollView, View, Text, Button, StyleSheet } from
'react-native';

const objects = [
['avocado', ' '], 🥑
['apple', ' '], 🍏
['orange', ' '], 🍊
['cactus', ' '], 🌵
['eggplant', ' '], 🍆
['strawberry', ' '], 🍓
['coconut', ' '], 🥥
];

const getRandomItem = () => {

const item = objects[~~(Math.random() * objects.length)];

return {
name: item[0],
icon: item[1],

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Use dedicated components for certain layouts The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

id: Date.now() + Math.random(),

};
};

const _items = Array.from(new Array(5000)).map(getRandomItem);

const List = () => {

const [items, setItems] = useState(_items);

const addItem = useCallback(() => {

setItems([getRandomItem()].concat(items));
}, [items]);

return (
<View style={styles.container}>
<Button title="add item" onPress={addItem} />
<ScrollView>
{items.map(({ name, icon, id }) => (
<View style={styles.itemContainer} key={id}>
<Text style={styles.name}>{name}</Text>
<Text style={styles.icon}>{icon}</Text>
</View>
))}
</ScrollView>
</View>
);
};

const styles = StyleSheet.create({

container: {
marginTop: 30,
},
itemContainer: {
borderWidth: 1,
margin: 3,
padding: 5,
flexDirection: 'row',
},
name: {
fontSize: 20,
width: 150,
},
icon: {
fontSize: 20,
},
});

export default List;

Read more: https://snack.expo.dev/@callstack-snack/scrollview-example

29
Use dedicated components for certain layouts The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

to a list based on FlatList.

import React, { useCallback, useState } from 'react';

import { View, Text, Button, FlatList, StyleSheet } from
'react-native';

const objects = [
'avocado ', 🥑
'apple ', 🍏
'orage ', 🍊
'cactus ', 🌵
'eggplant ', 🍆
'strawberry ', 🍓
'coconut ', 🥥
];
const getRandomItem = () => {
const item = objects[~~(Math.random() * objects.length)].
split(' ');

return {
name: item[0],
icon: item[1],
id: Date.now() + Math.random(),
};
};

const _items = Array.from(new Array(5000)).map(getRandomItem);

const List = () => {

const [items, setItems] = useState(_items);

const addItem = useCallback(() => {

setItems([getRandomItem()].concat(items));
}, [items]);

const keyExtractor = useCallback(({ id }) => id.toString(),

[]);

const renderItem = useCallback(

({ item: { name, icon } }) => (
<View style={styles.itemContainer}>
<Text style={styles.name}>{name}</Text>
<Text style={styles.icon}>{icon}</Text>
</View>
),
[],
);

return (
<View style={styles.container}>
<Button title="add item" onPress={addItem} />
<FlatList

30
Use dedicated components for certain layouts The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

data={items}
keyExtractor={keyExtractor}
renderItem={renderItem}
/>
</View>
);
};

const styles = StyleSheet.create({

container: {
marginTop: 30,
},
itemContainer: {
borderWidth: 1,
margin: 3,
padding: 5,
flexDirection: 'row',
},
name: {
fontSize: 20,
width: 150,
},
icon: {
fontSize: 20,
},
});

export default List;

Read more: https://snack.expo.dev/@callstack-snack/flatlist-example

The difference is significant, isn’t it? In the provided example of 5000

list items, the ScrollView version does not even scroll smoothly.

At the end of the day, FlatList uses ScrollView and View components
as well. What’s the deal then?

Well, the key lies in the logic that is abstracted away within the
FlatList component. It contains a lot of heuristics and advanced Ja-
vaScript calculations to reduce the amount of extraneous renderings
that happen while you’re displaying the data on screen and to make the
scrolling experience always run at 60FPS. Just using FlatList may not
be enough in some cases. FlatList performance optimizations rely on
not rendering elements that are currently not displayed on the screen.

31
Use dedicated components for certain layouts The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

The most costly part of the process is layout measuring. FlatList has
to measure your layout to determine how much space in the scroll area
should be reserved for upcoming elements.

For complex list elements, it may slow down the interaction with Flat-
List significantly. Every time FlatList approaches to render the next
batch of data, it will have to wait for all the new items to render to
measure their height.

However, you can implement getItemHeight() to define the element

height up-front without the need for measurement. It is not straightfor-
ward for items without a constant height. You can calculate the value
based on the number of lines of text and other layout constraints.
We recommend using the react-native-text-size library to calculate
the height of the displayed text for all list items at once. In our case, it
significantly improved the responsiveness for scroll events of FlatList
on Android.

FlashList as a successor to FlatList

As already discussed, FlatList drastically improves the performance
of a huge list compared to ScrollView. Despite proving itself as a per-
formant solution, it has some caveats.

There are popular cases where developers or users have encountered,

for instance, blank spaces while scrolling, laggy scrolling, and a list not
being snappy, almost on a daily basis. FlatList is designed to keep
certain elements in memory, which adds overhead on the device and
eventually slows the list down, and blank areas happen when FlatList
fails to render the items fast enough.

We can, however, minimize these problems to some extent by following

the tips here, but still, in most cases, we want more smoothness and
snappy lists. With FlatList, the JS thread is busy most of the time and
we always fancy having that 60FPS tag associated with our JS thread
when we’re scrolling the list.

32
Use dedicated components for certain layouts The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

So how should we approach such issues? If not FlatList, then what?

Luckily for us, the folks at Shopify developed a pretty good drop-in
replacement for FlatList, known as FlashList. The library works on
top of RecyclerListView, leveraging its recycling capability and fixing
common pain points such as complicated API, using cells with dynamic
heights, or first render layout inconsistencies.

FlashList recycles the views that are outside of the viewport and re-uses
them for other items. If the list has different items, FlashList uses a
recycle pool to use the item based on its type. It’s crucial to keep the
list items as light as possible, without any side effects, otherwise, it
will hurt the performance of the list.

There are a couple of props that are quite important with FlashList.
First is estimatedItemSize, the approximate size of the list item. It helps
FlashList to decide how many items to render before the initial load
and while scrolling. If we have different-sized items, we can average
them. We can get this value in a warning by the list, if we do not supply
it on the first render and then use it forward. The other way is to use
the element inspector from the dev support in the React Native app.
The second prop is overrideItemLayout, which is prioritized over es-
timatedItemSize. If we have different-sized items and we know their
sizes, it’s better to use them here instead of averaging them.

Let’s talk about measuring FlashList. Remember to turn on release

mode for the JS bundle beforehand. FlashList can appear to be slower
than FlatList in dev mode. The primary reason is a much smaller and
fixed windowSize equivalent. We can leverage FlashList’s built-in call-
back functions to measure the blank area onBlankArea and list load
time onLoad. You can read more about available helpers in the Metrics
section of the documentation.

We can also use Bamlab’s Android Performance Profiler, which gives us

the results for FPS on the release builds in the form of a performance
report. It also creates a nice-looking graph of CPU usage over the pe-
riod of profiling, so we can verify how certain actions affect this metric.

33
Use dedicated components for certain layouts The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Performance report from Bamlab’s Android Performance Profiler

There’s also a React Native Performance Monitor Flipper plugin. We

can use it to measure the FPS of the JS and UI threads in debug builds.
Make sure to turn off the DEV mode when profiling.

Benefits: Your app works faster, displays complex data

structures, and you opt-in for further improvements.
Thanks to using specialized components, your application will always
run as fast as possible. You can automatically opt-in to all the perfor-
mance optimizations performed by React Native and subscribe for

34
Use dedicated components for certain layouts The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

further updates. At the same time, you also save yourself a lot of time
reimplementing the most common UI patterns from the ground up,
sticky section headers, pull to refresh - you name it. These are already
supported by default if you choose to go with FlashList.

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 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

PA RT 1 | C H A P T E R 3

Think twice before

you pick an
external library
Think twice before you pick an external library The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

How working with the right JavaS-

cript libraries can help you boost
the speed and performance of your
apps.
Issue: You are choosing libraries without checking what
is inside
JavaScript development is like assembling applications out of smaller
blocks. To a certain degree, it is very similar to building React Native
apps. Instead of creating React components from scratch, you are on
the hunt for the JavaScript libraries that will help you achieve what you
had in mind. The JavaScript ecosystem promotes such an approach to
development and encourages structuring applications around small
and reusable modules.

This type of ecosystem has many advantages, but also some serious
drawbacks. One of them is that developers can find it hard to choose
from multiple libraries supporting the same use case.

When picking the one to use in the next project, they often research the
indicators that tell them if the library is healthy and well maintained,
such as GitHub stars, the number of issues, contributors, and PRs.

What they tend to overlook is the library’s size, number of supported

features, and external dependencies. They assume that since React
Native is all about JavaScript and embracing the existing toolchain,
they will work with the same constraints and best practices they know
from making web applications.

Truth is, they won’t, as mobile development is fundamentally different

and has its own set of rules. For example, while the size of the assets
is crucial in the case of web applications, it is not as equally important
in React Native, where assets are located in the filesystem.

37
Think twice before you pick an external library The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

The key difference lies in the performance of the mobile devices and
the tooling used for bundling and compiling the application.

Although you will not be able to do much about the device limitations,
you can control your JavaScript code. In general, less code means
faster opening time. And one of the most important factors affecting
the overall size of your code is libraries.

Complex libraries hamper the speed of your apps

Unlike a fully native application, a React Native app contains a JavaS-
cript bundle that needs to be loaded into memory. Then it is parsed
and executed by the JavaScript VM. The overall size of the JavaScript
code is an important factor.

Transpile

Interpretation with conventional engine engine Read more: https://snack.expo.io/7H5S504j3

While that happens, the application remains in the loading state. We

often describe this process as TTI – Time to Interactive. It is a time
expressed in (well, hopefully) the milliseconds between when the icon
gets selected from the application drawer and when it becomes fully
interactive.

Unfortunately, Metro – the default React Native bundler – currently

doesn’t support tree shaking. If you’re not familiar with this notion,
read this article.

This means that all the code that you pull from NPM and import to your
project will be present in your production bundle, loaded into memory,

38
Think twice before you pick an external library The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

and parsed.That can have a negative impact on the total startup time
of your application.

How do we analyze bundle size

Keeping tabs on your bundle size is very important. We can make use
of the react-native-bundle-visualizer to analyze the bundle with the help
of GUI. We can get the details of any added library in the bundle; hence
deciding if it’s worth keeping or removing that library. This package
produces output using the app bundle in the following form:

Solution: Be more selective and use smaller specialized

libraries.
The easiest way to overcome this issue is to employ the right strategy
for architecturing the project upfront.

If you are about to pull a complex library, check if there are smaller al-
ternatives that have the functionality you’re looking for.

39
Think twice before you pick an external library The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Here’s an example: One of the most common operations is manipu-

lating dates. Let’s imagine you are about to calculate an elapsed time.
Rather than pulling down the entire moment.js library (67.9 KB) to parse
the date itself,

import moment from 'moment';

const date = moment('12-25-1995', 'MM-DD-YYYY');

Parsing a date with moment.js

we can use day.js (only 2Kb) which is substantially smaller and offers
only the functionality that we’re looking for.

import dayjs from 'dayjs';

const date = dayjs('12-25-1995', 'MM-DD-YYYY');

Parsing a date with day.js

If there are no alternatives, a good rule of thumb is to check if you can

import a smaller part of the library.

For instance, many libraries such as lodash have already split them-
selves into smaller utility sets and support environments where dead
code elimination is unavailable.

Let’s say you want to use lodash map. Instead of importing the whole
library, (as presented here),

import { map } from 'lodash';

const square = (x) => x * x;

map([4, 8], square);

Using lodash map by importing the whole library

40
Think twice before you pick an external library The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

you could import only a single package:

import map from 'lodash/map';

const square = (x) => x * x;

map([4, 8], square);

Using lodash map by importing only single function

As a result, you can benefit from the utilities that are a part of the lodash
package without pulling them all into the application bundle.

If you’d like to have constant insight into your dependencies' size impact,
we highly recommend the import-cost VSCode extension. Or using the
Bundlephobia website.

Benefits: Your app has a smaller footprint and loads

faster.
Mobile is an extremely competitive environment, with lots of applica-
tions designed to serve similar purposes and fight over the same cus-
tomers. Faster startup time, smoother interactions, and the overall look
and feel might be your only way to stand out from the crowd.

You shouldn’t downplay the importance of choosing the right set of li-
braries. Being more selective with third-party dependencies may seem
irrelevant at first. But all the saved milliseconds will add up to signifi-
cant gains over time.

41
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

PA RT 1 | C H A P T E R 4

Always remember
to use libraries
dedicated to the
mobile platform
Always remember
to use libraries
dedicated to the mobile platform The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Use libraries dedicated to mobile

and build features faster on many
platforms at once, without
compromising on the performance
and user experience.
Issue: You use web libraries that are not optimized
for mobile.
As discussed earlier, one of the best things about React Native is that
you can write the mobile application with JavaScript, reuse some of
your React components, and do business logic with your favorite state
management library.

While React Native provides web-like functionality for compatibility with

the web, it is important to understand that it is not the same environ-
ment. It has its own set of best practices, quick wins, and constraints.

For example, while working on a web application, we don’t have to worry

too much about the overall CPU resources needed by our application.
After all, most of the websites run on devices that are either plugged
into the network or have large batteries.

It is not hard to imagine that mobile is different. There’s a wide range

of devices with different architectures and resources available. Most of
the time, they run on a battery and the drain caused by the application
can be a deciding factor for many developers.

In other words – how you optimize the battery consumption both in the
foreground and background can make all the difference.

43
Always remember
to use libraries
dedicated to the mobile platform The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Not optimized libraries cause battery drain and slow

down the app. The OS may limit your application’s
capabilities.
While React Native makes it possible to run the same JavaScript on
mobile as in the browser, that doesn’t mean you should be doing this
every time. As with every rule, there are exceptions.

If the library depends heavily on networking, such as real-time mes-

saging or offers the ability to render advanced graphics (3D structures,
diagrams), it is very likely that you’re better off going with a dedicated
mobile library.

Mobile libraries were developed within the web environment in the first
place, assuming the capabilities and constraints of the browser. It is
very likely that the result of using a web version of a popular SDK will
result in extraneous CPU and memory consumption.

Certain OSs, such as iOS, are known to be constantly analyzing the re-
sources consumed by the application in order to optimize the battery
life. If your application is registered to perform background activities
and these activities take too much of the resources, the interval for your
application may get adjusted, lowering the frequency of the background
updates that you initially signed up for.

Solution: Use a dedicated, platform-specific version

of the library.
Let’s take Firebase as an example. Firebase is a mobile platform from
Google that lets you build your apps faster. It is a collection of tools
and libraries that enable certain features instantly within your app.

Firebase contains SDKs for the web and mobile – iOS and Android re-
spectively. Each SDK contains support for Realtime Database.

44
Always remember
to use libraries
dedicated to the mobile platform The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

import { getDatabase, onValue, ref } from 'firebase/database';

const database = getDatabase();

onValue(ref(database, '/users/123'), (snapshot) => {

console.log(snapshot.val());
});

An example reading from Firebase Realtime Database in RN

Thanks to React Native, you can run the web version of it without major
problems:
However, this is not what you should be doing. While the above exam-
ple works without issues, it does not offer the same performance as
the mobile equivalent. The SDK itself also contains fewer features –
no surprises here, as web is different and there’s no reason Firebase.
js should provide support for mobile features.

In this particular example, it is better to use a dedicated Firebase library

that provides a thin layer on top of dedicated native SDKs and offers the
same performance and stability as any other native application out there.

45
Always remember
to use libraries
dedicated to the mobile platform The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

import database from '@react-native-firebase/database';

database().ref('/users/123').on('value', (snapshot) => {

console.log(snapshot.val());
});

An example reading from Firebase Realtime Database in RN

Here’s how the above example would look like:

As you can see, the difference is minimal. In this case, the library authors
did a great job mimicking the API to reduce the potential confusion
while switching back and forth between the web and mobile context.

Benefits: Provide the fastest and most performant

support with no harm to the battery life.
React Native is all about giving you control and freedom to choose how
you want to build your application.

For straightforward aspects and maximum reusability, you can choose

to go with the web version of the library. This will give you access to
the same features as in the browser with relatively low effort.

46
Always remember
to use libraries
dedicated to the mobile platform The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

For advanced use cases, you can easily extend React Native with a native
functionality and talk directly to the mobile SDKs. Such an escape hatch
is what makes React Native extremely versatile and enterprise-ready.
It allows you to build features faster on many platforms at once, without
compromising on the performance and user experience – something
other hybrid frameworks cannot claim.

47
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

PA RT 1 | C H A P T E R 5

Find the balance

between native
and JavaScript
Find the balance between native and JavaScript The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Seek the harmony between native

and JavaScript to build fast-working
and low-maintenance apps.
Issue: While working on native modules, you draw
the line in the wrong place between native and
JavaScript abstractions
When working with React Native, you’re going to be developing JavaS-
cript most of the time. However, there are situations when you need to
write a bit of native code. For example, you’re working with a third-party
SDK that doesn’t have official React Native support yet. In that case,
you need to create a native module that wraps the underlying native
methods and exports them to the React Native realm.

All native methods need real-world arguments to work. React Native

builds on top of an abstraction called a bridge, which provides bidirec-
tional communication between JavaScript and native worlds.

Note: There’s an ongoing effort to move away from

asynchronous bridge communication to a synchronous
one. You can read more about it in the New Architecture
chapter.
As a result, JavaScript can execute native APIs and pass the necessary
context to receive the desired return value. The communication itself is
asynchronous – it means that while the caller is waiting for the results
to arrive from the native side, the JavaScript is still running and may
already be up for another task.

49
Find the balance between native and JavaScript The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

The number of JavaScript calls that arrive over the bridge is not deter-
ministic and can vary over time, depending on the number of interac-
tions that you do within your application. Additionally, each call takes
time, as the JavaScript arguments need to be stringified into JSON,
which is the established format that can be understood by these two
realms.

For example, when the bridge is busy processing the data, another call
will have to block and wait. If that interaction was related to gestures
and animations, it is very likely that you have a dropped frame – the
operation wasn’t performed causing jitters in the UI.

50
Find the balance between native and JavaScript The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Certain libraries, such as Animated provide special workarounds. In

this case, use NativeDriver, which serializes the animation, passes it
once upfront to the native thread, and doesn’t cross the bridge while the
animation is running – preventing it from being subject to accidental
frame drops while other work is happening.
That’s why it is important to keep the bridge communication efficient
and fast.

More traffic flowing over the bridge means less space

for other things
Passing more traffic over the bridge means that there is less space for
other important things that React Native may want to transfer at that
time. As a result, your application may become unresponsive to ges-
tures or other interactions while you’re performing native calls.

If you are seeing a degraded UI performance while executing certain

native calls over the bridge or seeing substantial CPU consumption, you
should take a closer look at what you are doing with the external librar-
ies. It is very likely that there is more being transferred than should be.

Solution: Use the right amount of abstraction on the JS

side – validate and check the types ahead of time.
When building a native module, it is tempting to proxy the call immedi-
ately to the native side and let it do the rest. However, there are cases,
such as invalid arguments, that
end up causing an unnecessary round-trip over the bridge only to learn
that we didn’t provide the correct set of arguments.

Let’s take a JavaScript module that proxies the call straight to the un-
derlying native module.

51
Find the balance between native and JavaScript The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

import { NativeModules } from 'react-native';

const { ToastExample } = NativeModules;

export const show = (message, duration) => {

ToastExample.show(message, duration);
};

Bypassing arguments to the native module

In the case of an incorrect or missing parameter, the native module is

likely to throw an exception. The current version of React Native doesn’t
provide an abstraction for ensuring the JavaScript parameters and the
ones needed by your native code are in sync. Your call will be serialized
to JSON, transferred to the native side, and executed.

That operation will perform without any issues, even though we haven’t
passed the complete list of arguments needed for it to work. The error
will arrive in the next tick when the native side processes the call and
receives an exception from the native module.

In such a scenario, you have lost some time waiting for the exception
that you could’ve checked for beforehand.

import { NativeModules } from 'react-native';

const { ToastExample } = NativeModules;

export const show = (message, duration) => {

if (typeof message !== 'string' || message.length > 100) {
throw new Error('Invalid Toast content');
}

if (!Number.isInteger(duration) || duration > 20000) {

throw new Error('Invalid Toast duration');
}

ToastExample.show(message, duration);
};

Using the native module with arguments validation

The above is not only tied to the native modules themselves. It is worth

52
Find the balance between native and JavaScript The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

keeping in mind that every React Native primitive component has its
native equivalent and component props are passed over the bridge
every time there’s a rendering happening – just like you execute your
native method with the JavaScript arguments.

To put this into better perspective, let’s take a closer look at styling
within the React Native apps.

import React from 'react';

import { View } from 'react-native';

const App = () => {

return (
<View
style={{
flex: 1,
justifyContent: 'center',
alignItems: 'center',
}}>
<View
style={{
backgroundColor: 'coral',
width: 200,
height: 200,
}}
/>
</View>
);
};

export default App;

Read more: https://snack.expo.dev/@callstack-snack/inline-styled-view

The easiest way to style a component is to pass it an object with styles.

While it works, you will not see it happening too much. It is generally
considered an anti-pattern, unless you’re dealing with dynamic values,
such as changing the style of the component based on the state.

53
Find the balance between native and JavaScript The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

import React from 'react';

import { View, StyleSheet } from 'react-native';

const App = () => {

return (
<View style={styles.container}>
<View style={styles.box} />
</View>
);
};

const styles = StyleSheet.create({

container: {
flex: 1,
justifyContent: 'center',
alignItems: 'center',
},
box: {
backgroundColor: 'coral',
width: 200,
height: 200,
},
});

export default App;

Read more: https://snack.expo.dev/@callstack-snack/stylesheet-styled-view

React Native uses StyleSheet API to pass styles over the bridge most
of the time. That API processes your styles and makes sure they’re
passed only once over the bridge. During the runtime, it substitutes the
value of the style prop with a numeric unique identifier that corresponds
to the cached style on the native side.

As a result, rather than sending a large array of objects each time React
Native is meant to re-render its UI, the bridge has to now deal with an
array of numbers, which is much easier to process and tran fer.

Benefits: The codebase is faster and easier to maintain

Whether you’re facing any performance challenges right now, it is smart
to implement a set of best practices around native modules as the
benefits are not just about the speed but also the user experience.
Sure, keeping the right amount of the traffic flowing over the bridge will
eventually contribute to your application performing better and working

54
Find the balance between native and JavaScript The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

smoothly. As you can see, certain techniques mentioned in this sec-

tion are already being actively used inside React Native to provide you
a satisfactory performance out of the box. Being aware of them will
help you create applications that perform better under a heavy load.

However, one additional benefit that is worth pointing

out is the maintenance.
Keeping the heavy and advanced abstractions, such as validation, on the
JavaScript side will result in a very thin native layer that is nothing more
but just a wrapper around an underlying native SDK. In other words, the
native part of your module is going to look more like a copy-paste from
the documentation – comprehensible and specific.

Mastering this approach to the development of native modules is why

a lot of JavaScript developers can easily extend their applications with
additional functionality without specializing in Objective-C or Java.

55
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

PA RT 1 | C H A P T E R 6

Animate at 60FPS -
no matter what

90 FPS

1.0s

30 FPS

1.0s
Animate at 60FPS - no matter what The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Use native solutions to achieve

smooth animations and a ges-
ture-driven interface at 60FPS.
Issue: JS-driven animations are occupying the bridge
traffic and slowing down the application.
Mobile users are used to smooth and well-designed interfaces that
quickly respond to their interactions and provide prompt visual feed-
back. As a result, applications have to register a lot of animations in
many places that will have to run while other work is happening.

As we know from the previous section, the amount of information that

can be passed over the bridge is limited. There’s currently no built-in
priority queue. In other words, it is on you to structure and design your
application in a way that both the business logic and animations can
function without any disruptions. This is different from the way we are
used to performing animations. For example, on iOS, the built-in APIs
offer unprecedented performance and are always scheduled with the
appropriate priority. Long story short - we don’t have to worry too much
about ensuring they’re running at 60FPS.

With React Native, this story is a bit different. If you do not think about
your animations top-down beforehand and choose the right tools to
tackle this challenge, you’re on track to run into dropped frames sooner
or later.

Janky or slow animations affect the perception of the

app, making it look slow and unfinished
In today’s sea of applications, providing a smooth and interactive UI
might be one of your only ways to win over customers who are looking
to choose the app to go.

57
Animate at 60FPS - no matter what The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

If your application fails to provide a responsive interface that works

well with the user interactions (such as gestures), not only may it affect
new customers, but also decrease the ROI and user sentiment.

Mobile users like the interfaces that follow them along and that look
top-notch and ensure the animations are always running smoothly is
a fundamental part that builds such an experience.

Solution: If it’s possible, use native and correct

animations.
One-off animations
Enabling the usage of the native driver is the easiest way of quickly
improving your animations’ performance. However, the subset of style
props that can be used together with the native driver is limited. You
can use it with non-layout properties like transforms and opacity. It will
not work with colors, height, and others. Those are enough to imple-
ment most of the animations in your app because you usually want to
show/hide something or change its position.

const fadeAnim = useRef(new Animated.Value(0)).current;

const fadeIn = () => {

Animated.timing(fadeAnim, {
toValue: 1,
duration: 1000,
useNativeDriver: true, // enables native driver
}).start();
};

// [...]

<Animated.View style={{ opacity: fadeAnim }} />

Enabling the native driver for opacity animation

For more complex use cases, you can use the React Native Rean-
imated library. Its API is compatible with the basic Animated library
and introduces a set of fine-grained controls for your animations with

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a modern hooks-based interface. More importantly, it introduces the

possibility to animate all possible style props with the native driver. So
animating height or color will no longer be an issue. However, trans-
form and opacity animations will still be slightly faster since they are
GPU-accelerated. You can play with different combinations in this re-
animated playground.

Gesture-driven animations
The most desired effect that can be achieved with animations is being
able to control animation with a gesture. For your customers, this is the
most enjoyable part of the interface. It builds a strong sentiment and
makes the app feel very smooth and responsive. Plain React Native is
very limited when it comes to combining gestures with native driven
animations. You can utilize ScrollView scroll events to build things like
a smooth collapsible header.

For more sophisticated use cases, there is an awesome library—React

Native Gesture Handler—which allows you to handle different gestures
natively and interpolate those into animations. You can build a swipea-
ble element by combining it with Animated. While it will still require JS
callbacks, there is a remedy for that!

The most powerful pair of tools for gesture-driven animations is using

Gesture Handler combined with Reanimated. They were designed to
work together and give the possibility to build complex gesture-driven
animations that are fully calculated on the native side.

Reanimated API supports synchronous JavaScript execution on the UI

thread using the concept of worklets. The library’s runtime spawns a
secondary JS context on the UI thread that is then able to run JavaS-
cript functions in the form of said worklets. Now using your imagination
and leveraging Reanimated, you can create wonderful animations at
full available speeds.

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import React from 'react';

import { StyleSheet, View } from 'react-native';
import { PanGestureHandler } from 'react-native-gesture-
handler';
import Animated, {
useAnimatedGestureHandler,
useAnimatedStyle,
useSharedValue,
withSpring,
} from 'react-native-reanimated';

const Snappable = (props) => {

const startingPosition = 0;
const x = useSharedValue(startingPosition);
const y = useSharedValue(startingPosition);

const animatedStyle = useAnimatedStyle(() => {

return {
transform: [{ translateX: x.value }, { translateY:
y.value }],
};
});

const eventHandler = useAnimatedGestureHandler({

onStart: (event, ctx) => {
ctx.startX = x.value;
ctx.startY = y.value;
},
onActive: (event, ctx) => {
x.value = ctx.startX + event.translationX;
y.value = ctx.startY + event.translationY;
},
onEnd: (event, ctx) => {
x.value = withSpring(startingPosition);
y.value = withSpring(startingPosition);
},
});

return (
<PanGestureHandler onGestureEvent={eventHandler}>
<Animated.View style={animatedStyle}>{props.children}</
Animated.View>
</PanGestureHandler>
);
};

const Example = () => {

return (
<View style={styles.container}>
<Snappable>
<View style={styles.box} />
</Snappable>

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Animate at 60FPS - no matter what The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

</View>
);
};

export default Example;

const BOX_SIZE = 100;

const styles = StyleSheet.create({

container: {
flex: 1,
justifyContent: 'center',
alignItems: 'center',
backgroundColor: '#F5FCFF',
},
box: {
width: BOX_SIZE,
height: BOX_SIZE,
borderColor: '#F5FCFF',
alignSelf: 'center',
backgroundColor: 'plum',
margin: BOX_SIZE / 2,
},
});

Read more: https://snack.expo.dev/@callstack-snack/gesture-with-animation

Low-level handling of gestures might not be a piece of cake, but for-

tunately, there are third-party libraries that utilize the mentioned tools
and expose the prop callbackNode. It’s an Animated.Value that’s de-
rived from specific gesture behavior. Its value range is usually from 0
to 1, which follows the progress of the gesture. You can interpolate
the values to animated elements on the screen. A great example of
the libraries that expose CallbackNode are reanimated-bottom-sheet
and react-native-tab-view.

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Animate at 60FPS - no matter what The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

import * as React from 'react';

import { StyleSheet, Text, View } from 'react-native';
import Animated from 'react-native-reanimated';
import BottomSheet from 'reanimated-bottom-sheet';
import Lorem from './Lorem';

const { Value, interpolateNode: interpolate } = Animated;

const Example = () => {

const gestureCallbackNode = new Value(0);

const renderHeader = () => (

<View style={styles.headerContainer}>
<Text style={styles.headerTitle}>Drag me</Text>
</View>
);

const renderInner = () => (

<View style={styles.innerContainer}>
<Animated.View
style={{
opacity: interpolate(gestureCallbackNode, {
inputRange: [0, 1],
outputRange: [1, 0],
}),
transform: [
{
translateY: interpolate(gestureCallbackNode, {
inputRange: [0, 1],
outputRange: [0, 100],
}),
},
],
}}>
<Lorem />
<Lorem />
</Animated.View>
</View>
);

return (
<View style={styles.container}>
<BottomSheet
callbackNode={gestureCallbackNode}
snapPoints={[50, 400]}
initialSnap={1}
renderHeader={renderHeader}
renderContent={renderInner}
/>
</View>
);
};

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export default Example;

const styles = StyleSheet.create({

container: {
flex: 1,
},
headerContainer: {
width: '100%',
backgroundColor: 'lightgrey',
height: 40,
borderWidth: 2,
},
headerTitle: {
textAlign: 'center',
fontSize: 20,
padding: 5,
},
innerContainer: {
backgroundColor: 'lightblue',
},
});

Read more: https://snack.expo.dev/@callstack-snack/interpolation

Giving your JS operations a lower priority

It is not always possible to fully control the way animations are imple-
mented. For example, React Navigation uses a combination of React
Native Gesture Handler and Animated which still needs JavaScript to
control the animation runtime. As a result, your animation may start
flickering if the screen you are navigating to loads a heavy UI. Fortu-
nately, you can postpone the execution of such actions using Inter-
actionManager.

Note: In the near future, you’ll be able to achieve similar behavior with
React itself on a renderer level (with Fabric) using the startTransition
API. Read more about it in the New Architecture chapter.

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Animate at 60FPS - no matter what The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

import React, { useState, useRef } from 'react';

import {
Text,
View,
StyleSheet,
Button,
Animated,
InteractionManager,
Platform,
} from 'react-native';
import Constants from 'expo-constants';

const ExpensiveTaskStates = {
notStared: 'not started',
scheduled: 'scheduled',
done: 'done',
};

const App = () => {

const animationValue = useRef(new Animated.Value(100));
const [animationState, setAnimationState] = useState(false);
const [expensiveTaskState, setExpensiveTaskState] = useState(
ExpensiveTaskStates.notStared,
);

const startAnimationAndScheduleExpensiveTask = () => {

Animated.timing(animationValue.current, {
duration: 2000,
toValue: animationState ? 100 : 300,
useNativeDriver: false,
}).start(() => {
setAnimationState((prev) => !prev);
});
setExpensiveTaskState(ExpensiveTaskStates.scheduled);
InteractionManager.runAfterInteractions(() => {
setExpensiveTaskState(ExpensiveTaskStates.done);
});
};

return (
<View style={styles.container}>
{Platform.OS === 'web' ? (
<Text style={styles.infoLabel}>
❗
InteractionManager works only on native platforms.
Open example on
iOS or Android❗
</Text>
) : (
<>
<Button
title="Start animation and schedule expensive task"

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Animate at 60FPS - no matter what The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

onPress={startAnimationAndScheduleExpensiveTask}
/>
<Animated.View
style={[styles.box, { width: animationValue.current
}]}>
<Text>Animated box</Text>
</Animated.View>
<Text style={styles.paragraph}>
Expensive task status: {expensiveTaskState}
</Text>
</>
)}
</View>
);
};

const styles = StyleSheet.create({

container: {
flex: 1,
justifyContent: 'center',
alignItems: 'center',
paddingTop: Constants.statusBarHeight,
padding: 8,
},
paragraph: {
margin: 24,
fontSize: 18,
textAlign: 'center',
},
box: {
backgroundColor: 'coral',
marginVertical: 20,
height: 50,
},
infoLabel: {
textAlign: 'center',
},
});

export default App;

Read more: https://snack.expo.dev/@callstack-snack/interaction-manager

This handy React Native module allows you to execute any code after
all running animations are finished. In practice, you can show a place-
holder, wait for the animation to finish, and then render the actual UI.
It would help your JavaScript animations to run smoothly and avoid

65
Animate at 60FPS - no matter what The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

interruptions by other operations. It’s usually smooth enough to provide

a great experience.

Benefits: Enjoy smooth animations and a gesture-driven

interface at 60FPS.
There’s no one single right way of doing animations in React Native.
The ecosystem is full of different libraries and approaches to handling
interactions. The ideas suggested in this section are just recommen-
dations to encourage you to not take the smooth interface for granted.

What is more important is painting that top-down picture in your head

of all interactions within the application and choosing the right ways
of handling them. There are cases where JavaScript-driven animations
will work just fine. At the same time, there are interactions where native
animation (or an entirely native view) will be your only way to make it
smooth.

With such an approach, the application you create will be smoother

and snappy. It will not only be pleasant for your users to use but also
for you to debug and have fun with it while developing.

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 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

PA RT 1 | C H A P T E R 7

Replace Lottie
with Rive
Replace Lottie With Rive The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Leverage state machines to provide

robust interactive animations at 60FPS
Issue: Real-time animations suffering from low FPS, file
size, and not being robust
When we talk about interactive mobile apps, we often think there’ll be
using certain user driven animations. For example, we can think of
getting a nice order placed animation when we complete a checkout.
A more complex example would be onboarding steps where the user
has to tap on various buttons to move forward and, in most cases,
each step shows a nice animation. So how can developers implement
such behavior? One approach is using GIFs. If we have 3 onboarding
steps, then we will want to have 3 GIFs. And often this solution is good
enough performance- and UX-wise. But what if we need more fidelity
in our animations? Or when it needs to be high quality, maybe on a full
screen? GIFs can quickly add a few megabytes to our app’s bundle.

So what other options do we have? Let’s talk about Lottie. A mobile cli-
ent for Android and iOS, which was created by the developers at Airbnb
to leverage LottieFiles, which is JSON-based animation exported using
the plugin BodyMoving from Adobe AfterEffects. They have a pretty
good community with lots of free-to-use animations. Check it out here.

If we look at the React Native Lottie library, it is pretty popular and

well-received by the community. We can control the animation using
the progress prop or use imperative methods such as play. There are
other useful props that we can use to suit our needs. Let’s compare the
size of a Lottie JSON animation and a corresponding GIF.

68
Replace Lottie With Rive The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Source: https://lottiefiles.com/128635-letter-d

If we compare, JSON is 46.2 KB and the GIF is 164.5 KB, which is almost
4 times as much as JSON. We can further reduce the size of JSON
using the Optimized Lottie JSON but that’s a paid solution. Now if we
recall the above approach of having separate GIFs for each onboard-
ing step, we can now use Lottie instead of GIFs since it’s smaller. We
can also use the remote resources of Lottie JSON instead of having it
in a bundle but an extra effort will be required to keep it available for
offline purposes.

We can still do better, but how good will that be if we use a single an-
imation and control it using triggers? For example, if we tap on a but-
ton, the state of the animation changes for the next step. Let’s say we
want to change the size or do other customizations, we can’t do it in
the editor provided by LottieFiles. Instead, we will have to import that
in Adobe AE and then do the adjustments and re-export it as JSON.
We can, however, customize the color for layers in the web editor. Not
everyone has expertise in using Adobe AE and has an animator to

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Replace Lottie With Rive The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

consult, e.g. if we’re working on our pet project, we will want to adjust
any animation in the web editor.

There are other factors around performance associated with Lottie

which we will discuss in the next section.

Solution: Leverage developer-friendly tools which offer

better FPS with less file size.
There’s a new tool in town called Rive. It aims to be an alternative to
Lottie by providing everything Lottie does and then some. It also ships
a web editor to customize real-time animations on the go. The editor
allows the user to build interactive animations which have the capa-
bility to interact based on the inputs provided by the user. Having trig-
ger-based animations is a great win, especially for mobile platforms.

Remember the approach we took for the onboarding steps animations?

Now if we use Rive animations, we can leverage its state machine, trig-
gers, and user inputs to use a single animation file for our onboarding
steps. It really helps in improving the developer experience and the
cherry on top: the size of the animation file is very small compared to
Lottie JSON. We also don’t have to keep different files for each onboard-
ing step; hence saving some KBs for the bundle as well.

70
Replace Lottie With Rive The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

import React, { useRef } from 'react';

import { Button, SafeAreaView, StyleSheet } from 'react-
native';
import Rive, { RiveRef } from 'rive-react-native';

const stateMachineOne = 'State Machine 1';

const App = () => {

const riveRef = useRef<RiveRef>(null);
const isRunning = useRef(false);

const onIsRunning = () => {

isRunning.current = !isRunning.current;
riveRef.current?.setInputState(
stateMachineOne,
'isRunning',
isRunning.current,
);
};

const onSideKick = () => {

riveRef.current?.fireState(stateMachineOne, 'sideKick');
};

return (
<SafeAreaView>
<Rive
ref={riveRef}
resourceName="character"
style={styles.character}
stateMachineName={stateMachineOne}
autoplay
/>
<Button title="Is Running" onPress={onIsRunning} />
<Button title="SideKick" onPress={onSideKick}
color="#3e3e3e" />
</SafeAreaView>
);
};

export default App;

const styles = StyleSheet.create({

character: {
width: 400,
height: 400,
},
});

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Replace Lottie With Rive The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

As we see, adding complex animation is developer-friendly. We can

also add triggers or input-based animations quickly. All we need is the
information regarding the state machine, inputs, and triggers. If we
have an animator who built a beautiful animation for our project on
Rive Editor, we can ask them to pass along the info. Otherwise, we can
always look up this info in the web editor ourselves.

Now let’s talk about performance in terms of FPS, CPU, and memory
consumption. We will do a comparison of an animation that is built for
Lottie with the same animation built for Rive. This tweet shows bench-
marks done for the web platform. We’ll extend this by using the same
animations for Rive and Lottie on our React Native app.

Lottie

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Replace Lottie With Rive The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Rive

We benchmarked this on a Sony Xperia Z3 model using an Android

profiler and Perf monitor that is shipped with the React Native app. We
disabled the DEV mode so that our JS thread doesn’t throttle because
of it.

Both images show a tiny window right above the rocket with details of
FPS on both the UI and JS thread. The results show that the Rive ani-
mation runs almost at 60FPS whereas Lottie runs at 17FPS.

Now let’s focus on the right part of both images, which is the Memory
consumption detailed view. If we look closely, there are mainly three
portions: Java, Native, and Graphics. Java represents the memory
allocated for Java or Kotlin code. The Native represents the memory
allocated from C or C++ code. The graphics represent the memory
used for the graphics buffer queues to display pixels on the screen. In
Java, Lottie uses almost 23 MB and Rive uses almost 12 MB of RAM.
In Native, Lottie uses 49 MB and Rive uses 25 MB of RAM. In Graphics,
Lottie consumes 123 MB, whereas Rive uses 184 MB of RAM. The total
memory consumption of Lottie is 246 MB and Rive is 276 MB.

73
Replace Lottie With Rive The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

The results show that Rive outperforms Lottie in all departments ex-
cept Graphics. The end user expects the app to run at 60FPS to enjoy a
smooth user experience. If one has to do a trade-off between memory
consumption and FPS, they might go with FPS as most of the devices
have enough memory to exercise the app’s needs.

Benefits: A reduced regression cycle while developing

a feature and a happy user base
If we opt-in to a world without state machines, the developers will be
implementing the logic in their code. And each time there is a change
in the interactivity of the animation, devs will be required to re-work
their code. This is not a good developer experience.

Rive’s state machines give designers the power to think as if they were
coding and structure the state machine for an animation that will inter-
act after being given a certain input. Now the developer can use that
animation and implement the interactivity firing the inputs on the ani-
mation and be done with it. If this animation needs to be changed with
the same inputs, the dev only needs to replace the animation source
and that’s it. More info here

Almost 18.7% of people uninstall the app due to storage issues. This
hurts the company’s ROI. Developers should always pay attention to
reducing the bundle size and the storage utilized by their app. In a tweet

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Replace Lottie With Rive The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

by Rive’s CEO, the Lottie file was around 24.37 KB and the same Rive
file was around 2 KB. At the end of the day, each KB saved adds up to a
reduced app size. We always want to choose a library that best fulfills
our needs by providing a better developer experience, ease of API, and
a smooth experience for the end user.

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PA RT 1 | C H A P T E R 8

Optimize your
app’s JavaScript
bundle
Optimize your app’s JavaScript bundle The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Issue: Metro, the default JS bundler

for React Native, produces a bundle
that’s too large.
React Native application’s logic is mostly located in the JavaScript
code which runs in the JavaScript engine (JavaScriptCore or Hermes).
But before loading JavaScript code into the app, it should be bundled,
usually into a single JS file or sometimes to multiple files. React Na-
tive provides a built-in tool for JavaScript code bundling called Metro.

Solution: Use external plugins or swap it with third-party

bundlers.
Metro takes in an entry file and various options and gives you back a
single JavaScript file that includes all your code and its dependencies,
also known as a JavaScript bundle. According to official docs, Metro
speeds up builds using a local cache of transformed modules out of
the box. Metro trades configurability for performance, whereas other
bundles like Webpack are the other way around. So when your project
needs custom loaders, use symlinks or the proven Webpack configu-
ration for bundling JavaScript code and splitting app logic. There are a
few alternative bundlers that could be used in React Native apps and
provide more configuration features. Each of them have some benefits
and limitations

Re.Pack
Re.Pack is a Webpack-based toolkit to build your React Native appli-
cation with full support of the Webpack ecosystem of loaders, plugins,
and support for various features like symlinks, aliases, code splitting,
etc. Re.Pack is the successor to Haul, which served a similar purpose
but balanced a different set of tradeoffs and developer experience.
The ecosystem part of Webpack is crucial for many developers, since
it’s the most popular bundler of the web, making the community be-
hind loaders and plugins its key advantage. Thanks to that pluggability,
it provides ways to improve the build process and Webpack’s overall

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Optimize your app’s JavaScript bundle The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

performance. At least for the parts that are not connected to the inter-
nal module graph building and processing. Such parts would be, e.g.
JavaScript and TypeScript transpilation or code minification. You can
replace Babel transpiler and Terser minifier with faster alternatives like
ESBuild thanks to the esbuild-loader or swc with swc-loader.

Another Webpack feature that helps our apps achieve better perfor-
mance is reducing the amount of code in the final bundle with tree
shaking. Tree shaking is a dead code elimination technique done by
analyzing the import and export statements in the source code and
determining which code is actually used by the application. Webpack
will then remove any unused code from the final bundle, resulting in a
smaller and more efficient application. The code that’s eligible for tree
shaking needs to be written in ECMAScript modules (import and export
statements) and mark itself as side-effect free through package.json
“sideEffects: false” clause.

The very first issue on Metro bundler’s GitHub is about symlink support.
It remains open today, as there are various reasons Metro is blocked
to introduce this functionality with the desired DX. There are ways to
mitigate that particular shortcoming, but they require extra configura-
tion. Webpack, on the other hand, as virtually any other bundler, and
doesn’t have this issue. Re.Pack uses the Webpack bundler under the
hood so it provides symlinks functionality out-of-the-box. Which could
be invaluable from the developer experience point of view of some
workflows like monorepos.

Re.Pack also offers the ability to use asynchronous chunks to split

your bundle into multiple files and load them on-demand. Which can
improve initial loading times if you’re using the JavaScriptCore engine.
However, it won’t provide that much value when used with Hermes,
which leverages the memory mapping technique for dynamic reading
only the necessary parts of the bundle’s bytecode directly from the RAM.
But there’s a twist to that! Webpack doesn’t really care whether you load
the dynamic chunk from the filesystem or remote. Hence it allows for
dynamic loading code that’s never been there in the app bundle in the

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Optimize your app’s JavaScript bundle The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

first place. Directly from a remote server or a CDN. Now this can help
you with reducing not only the initial load time, but also the precious
app size.

On top of that, Webpack 5 introduced support for the concept of Module

Federation. It’s a functionality that allows for code-splitting and sharing
the split code parts (or chunks) between independent applications. It
also helps distributed and independent teams to ship large applications
faster. Giving them the freedom to choose any UI framework they like
and deploy independently, while still sharing the same build infrastruc-
ture. Re.Pack 3 supports this functionality out-of-the-box.

All these configurations and flexibility affect the build process. The
build speed is a little bit longer than the default Metro bundler due to
customization options. Also, the Fast Refresh functionality is limited
compared to the Metro bundler. The Hot Module Replacement and Re-
act Refresh features require the full application reloaded with Webpack
and Re.Pack, but they are supported by Metro.
If you don’t need the huge customization that the Webpack ecosystem
offers or don’t plan to split your app code, then you may as well keep
the default Metro bundler.

react-native-esbuild
One of the main benefits of react-native-esbuild is fast builds. It uses
the ESBuild bundler under the hood which has huge improvements in
bundling performance even without caching. It also provides some
features like tree shaking and is much more configurable compared to
the Metro bundler. ESBuild has its own ecosystem with plugins, cus-
tom transformers, and env variables. This loader is enabled by default
for .ts, .tsx, .mts, and .cts files, which means ESBuild has built-in
support for parsing TypeScript syntax and discarding the type annota-
tions. However, ESBuild does not do any type checking so you will still
need to run type check in parallel with ESBuild to check types. This is
not something ESBuild does itself.
Unfortunately, react-native-esbuild has some tradeoffs, so it is very im-
portant to select the right bundler by paying attention to them as well.

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Optimize your app’s JavaScript bundle The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

It doesn’t support Hermes, which could be a crucial point for some

projects. And it does not have Fast Refresh or Hot Module Replacement,
but this library supports live reload instead.

rnx-kit
An interesting extension to Metro is Microsoft’s rnx-kit. It is a package
with a huge variety of React Native development tools. It also has a
custom bundler that works on top of the Metro bundler enhancing it.
As you already know, Metro does not support symlinks. rnx-kit provides
the ability to fully work with symlinks. One more benefit compared to
Metro is the tree shaking functionality out-of-the-box.
Metro supports TypeScript source files, but it only transpiles them to
JavaScript. Metro does not do any type-checking. rnx-kit solves this
problem. Through the configuration, you can enable type-checking.
Warnings and errors from TypeScript appear on the console.
Also, rnx-kit provides duplicate dependencies and cyclic dependencies
detection out-of-the-box. This could be very useful to reduce the size
of the bundle which leads to better performance and prevents cyclic
dependencies issues.

Benefits: Ship less JavaScript to your users. Save devel-

opers’ time when bundling.
The choice of a bundle tool depends on the specific case. It is impos-
sible to select only one bundler for all the apps. If you need custom-
ization options provided by the Webpack ecosystem or plan to split
your app code, then we would suggest using Re.Pack for its widely
customizable configuration, a huge amount of loaders, plugins main-
tained by the community, and a lot of features like symlinks, aliases,
etc. compared to other bundle tools. If the Webpack ecosystem feels
overhead, then it is better to stay with the default Metro bundler or try
to use other bundler options like react-native-esbuild and rnx-kit which
also provides some benefits like decreased build time, using esbuild
under the hood, symlinks, and typescript support out-of-the-box. But
be careful and always pay attention to the tradeoffs that come with a
new bundling system.

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Optimize your app’s JavaScript bundle The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

If you need help with performance,

stability, user experience, or other
complex issues - contact us!
As React Native Core Contributors and leaders of the
community, we will be happy to help.

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Improve performance by using

the latest React Native features.
React Native is growing fast and so is the number
of features
Last year, developers contributed more than 3670 commits to the React
Native core. The number may seem impressive, but, in fact, it’s even
larger, since it doesn’t include the smaller contributions made under
the React Native Community organization (9678 commits).

All that proves that React Native is developing at a really healthy pace.
Contributions made by both the community and Meta enable more
and more advanced use cases of the framework. A great example of
that is Hermes – an entirely new JavaScript engine built and designed
specifically for React Native and Android. Hermes aims to replace the
JavaScriptCore, previously used on both Android and iOS. It also brings
a lot of enterprise-grade optimizations by improving your Android ap-
plication’s performance, start-up time, and overall size reduction.

In this section, we will show you some of the features you can turn on
right now to start your optimization process. We also encourage you
to keep track of all the new React Native features to make sure you use
the framework to its full potential.
 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

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Always run the

latest React Native
version to access
the new features
Always run the latest version of React Native to access the new features The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Upgrade your app to the latest ver-

sion to get more features and better
support.
Issue: You are running an old and unsupported version
of React Native and depriving yourself of new
improvements and features
Keeping your application up to speed with the frameworks you use is
crucial. That is why you should subscribe to the latest features, perfor-
mance improvements, and security fixes.
The JavaScript ecosystem is particularly interesting in this aspect, as
it moves really quickly. If you don’t update your app regularly, chances
are your code will end up being so far behind that upgrading it will be-
come painful and risky.

Every day, developers from all around the world introduce new features,
critical bug fixes, and security patches. On average, each release in-
cludes around 500 commits.

Over the years, React Native has grown significantly, thanks to open-
source contributors and Meta’s dedication to improving the ecosystem.
Here are some highlighted crucial features that have been introduced
to React Native over the course of its releases:

Fast Refresh
To improve the developer experience and velocity, the React team in-
troduced a feature called Fast Refresh to React Native. This lets you
quickly reflect the code on the device, whenever you save the file instead
of building or reloading the app. It is smart enough to decide when to
do a reload after we fix an error or just render otherwise.
A tip here: the local state of functional components and hooks is pre-
served by default. We can override this by adding a comment to that

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file: // @refresh reset. Whereas, class components are remounted

without preserving the state.

Auto-Linking
Whenever we add native code to our React Native app as a dependency,
it needs to be linked. Previously linking was done manually or using
react-native link dep-name. React Native CLI introduced auto-linking so
the devs didn’t need to link a library themselves. After a couple of years,
when the re-architecture of React Native was released to the community,
a need arose to auto link fabric components and turbo modules, which
was handled gracefully by the CLI team. They released an update to
the community to help the developer experience and velocity.

Flipper
Introduced as a recommended way of debugging React Native apps,
Flipper is loaded with awesome tools such as ReactDevtools, Network
Inspector, Native Layout Inspector, and others. We can also view the
Metro and Device logs right in Flipper. The community has appreci-
ated such a feature, and one example of that is a performance plugin
that we can install in Flipper to measure the performance of the React
Native apps.

LogBox
React Native redesigned its error and warning handling system. They
had to do a ground-up redesign of its logging system and the developer
experience is much better because of it. Developers can easily trace
the cause of an error using code frames and component stacks. Syn-
tax error formatting helps to understand the issue more quickly with
the aid of syntax highlighting. Log Notifications show warnings and
logs at the bottom of the screen instead of covering the whole screen.

Hermes
A new JS engine created by Meta to improve the performance of React
Native apps in terms of CPU usage, memory consumption, app size,
and Time To Interactive (TTI). Initial support was launched for Android

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devices, but after two years, support was extended to iOS as well. After
a couple of months, the previously used garbage collector for Hermes
GenGC was replaced with a new one called Hades - a concurrent gar-
bage collector. The Meta team saw improvements of CPU-intensive
workloads by 20-50%. Later on, the team decided to ship a bundled
Hermes instead of downloading it from NPM. This was done to avoid
confusion between what version of Hermes is compatible with React
Native. Also, both Hermes and React Native use the same JSI code
which makes it hard to maintain. Now whenever a version of React Na-
tive is released, a version of Hermes can be released as well, making
sure that both are fully compatible.

New Architecture
This one has its own chapter.

In the React Native ecosystem, it’s common that libraries are not back-
ward- compatible. New features often use goodies not available in the
previous versions of the framework. This means that if your application
runs on an older version of React Native, you are eventually going to
start missing out on the latest improvements.

@react-native-community/cli react-native

^10.0.0 ^0.71

^9.0.0 ^0.70

^8.0.0 ^0.69

^7.0.0 ^0.64

^6.0.0 ^0.68

^5.0.0 ^0.65,^0.66,^0.67

^4.0.0 ^0.62, ^0.63

^3.0.0 ^0.61

^2.0.0 ^0.60

^1.0.0 ^0.59

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That’s why keeping up with the newest React Native upgrades are the
only way to go.

Unfortunately, there is some serious work associated with upgrading

your React Native code with every new release. Its amount will depend
on the number of underlying changes to the native functionalities and
core pieces. Most of the time, you have to carefully analyze and com-
pare your project against the latest version and make the adjustments
on your own. This task is easier if you’re already comfortable with
moving around the native environment. But if you’re like most of us, it
might be a bit more challenging.

For instance, it may turn out that the modules and components you
used in your code are no longer part of the react-native core.

It would be because of the changes introduced by Meta during a pro-

cess called the lean core. The goals of the effort were to:
• Make the react-native package smaller, more flexible, and easier to
maintain by extracting some parts of the core and moving them to
the react-native-community repository,
• Transfer the maintenance of the extracted modules to the commu-
nity.

The process accelerated the growth of particular modules and made

the whole ecosystem better organized. But it also had some negative
effects on the react-native upgrading experience. Now, you have to
install the extracted packages as an additional dependency, and until
you do, your app will not compile or crash at runtime.
However, from a developer’s perspective, the migration to community
packages is usually nothing more than introducing a new dependency
and rewriting imports.

Another important issue is the support of third-parties. Your code usu-

ally relies on external libraries and there’s a risk that they might also be
incompatible with the latest React Native version.

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There are at least two ways to solve this problem:

• Wait for the project maintainers to perform the necessary adjust-
ments before you upgrade.
• Look for alternatives or patch the modules yourself – by using
a handy utility called patch-package or creating a temporary fork
with the necessary fixes.

Running on an old version means shipping with issues

that may discourage your users
If you are running on an older version, it is likely that you are lagging
behind your competition that uses the latest versions of the framework.

The number of fixes, improvements, and advancements in the React

Native framework is really impressive. If you’re playing a game of catch
up, you are opting out of a lot of updates that would make your life a lot
easier. The workload and the cost involved in making regular upgrades
are always offset by the immediate DX enhancements.

In this section, we present some of the well-established practices to

make upgrading React Native to the newer version easier.

Solution: Upgrade to the latest version of React Native

(we’ll show you how).
Upgrading React Native might not be the easiest thing in the world.
But there are tools that can simplify the process and take most of the
problems away.

The actual amount of work will depend on the number of changes and
your base version. However, the steps presented in this section can be
applied to every upgrade, regardless of the state of your application.

Preparing for the upgrade

React Native Upgrade Helper is a good place to start. On a high level,
it gives you an overview of the changes that have happened to React

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Native since the last time you upgraded your local version.

To do so, the helper compares bare React Native projects created by

running npx react-native init with your version and the one you’re up-
grading to. Next, it shows the differences between the projects, making
you aware of every little modification that took place in the meantime.
Some changes may be additionally annotated with special information
that will give more context on why something has happened.

Additional explanation of the more interesting changes to user files

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Having a better overview of the changes will help you move faster and
act with more confidence.

Note: Having more context is really important as there

is no automation in place when it comes to upgrading -
you will have to apply the changes yourself.
React Native Upgrade Helper also suggests useful content to read while
upgrading. In most cases that includes a dedicated blog post published
on the React Native blog as well as the raw changelog.

Useful content to read while upgrading React Native to a newer version

We advise you to read the recommended resources to get a better grip

on the upcoming release and learn about its highlights.

Thanks to that, you will not only be aware of the changes, but you will
also understand the reasoning behind them. And you will be ready to
open up your project and start working on it.

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Applying the JavaScript changes

The process of upgrading the JavaScript part of React Native is similar
to upgrading other JavaScript frameworks. Our recommendation here
is to perform upgrades step-by-step - bumping one library at a time.
As a rule of thumb, once you have upgraded a library, save your work
at that point in a commit and then move on to the next library. In our
opinion, this approach is better than upgrading everything at once as it
gives you more control and makes catching regressions much easier.

The first step is to bump the React and React Native dependencies to
the desired versions and perform the necessary changes (including
breaking changes). To do so, you can look up the suggestions provided
by React Native Upgrade Helper and apply them manually. Once it’s
completed, make sure to reinstall your node_modules.

Note: When performing the upgrade, you may see a lot

of changes coming from iOS project files (everything
inside .xcodeproj, including .pbxproj). These are files
generated by Xcode as you work with your iOS part
of React Native application. Instead of modifying the
source file, it is better to perform the changes via the
Xcode UI. This was the case with upgrading to React
Native 0.60 and the appropriate operations were
described in this issue.
Finally, you should try running the application. If everything is working -
perfect. The upgrade was smooth and you can call it a day! On a more
serious note though – now you should check if there are newer ver-
sions of other dependencies you use! They may be shipping important
performance improvements.

Unfortunately, there’s also another more pessimistic scenario. Your

app may not build at all or may instantly crash with a red screen. In
that case, it is very likely that some of your third-party dependencies

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are not working properly, as in some cases the dependencies include

native code which supports new OS features, so you need to make
them compatible with your React Native version.

Note: If you have a problem with your upgrades, you

can check the Upgrade Support project. It is a reposito-
ry where developers share their experience and help
each other solve some of the most challenging opera-
tions related to upgrading.

Upgrading third-party libraries

In most cases, it’s your React Native dependencies that you should
look at first. Unlike regular JavaScript/React packages, they often de-
pend on native build systems and more advanced React Native APIs.
This exposes them to potential errors as the framework matures into
a more stable API.

If the error occurs during the build time, bumping the dependency to
its latest version usually makes it work. But it may not always be the
case. To make sure the version of React Native you’re upgrading to
is compatible with your dependencies, use the align-deps project by
Microsoft developers. It allows you to keep your dependencies on the
right version based on the requirements and by leveraging the presets
of rules. It also has a CLI, so you can wire it up to your CI and ensure
that no one in your repo or monorepo will inadvertently introduce in-
compatible versions of packages and break the app.

Once your application builds, you are ready to check the changelog and
make yourself familiar with the JavaScript changes that happened to
the public API. If you overlook this step, it can result in runtime excep-
tions. Using Flow or TypeScript should guarantee that the changes
were applied properly.

As you can see, there is no magic trick that would fix all the errors and

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upgrade the dependencies automatically. This is mostly manual work

that has to be done with patience and attention. It also requires a lot of
testing to ensure that you didn’t break any features along the way. For-
tunately, there are tools like align-deps that help you avoid at least some
of the manual work, improving the upgrading experience significantly.

Benefits: You’re running the latest versions which trans-

lates to more features and better support.
Upgrading to the latest React Native version shouldn’t be different from
keeping your other frameworks and libraries up to date. Apart from
critical performance and security improvements, new React Native re-
leases also address the latest underlying changes to iOS and Android.
That includes the breaking changes that apply to mobile phones, such
as when certain APIs get deprecated.

Here is an example: In 2019, Google announced that all Android ap-

plications submitted to Google Play after August 1, 2019 had to be
64-bit. In order to continue developing your application and shipping
new features, you had to upgrade to React Native 0.59 and perform
the necessary adjustments.

Upgrades like this are really critical to keeping your users satisfied. Af-
ter all, they would be disappointed if the app started to crash with the
newer version of the operating system or disappeared from the App
Store. There might be some additional workload associated with every
release, but staying up to date will pay back with happier users, more
stable apps, and a better development experience.

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How to debug
faster and better
with Flipper
How to debug faster and better with Flipper The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Establish a better feedback loop by

implementing Flipper and have more
fun while working on your apps.
Issue: You’re using Chrome Debugger or some other
hacky way to debug and profile your React Native
application.
Debugging is one of the more challenging parts of every developer’s
daily work and finding out what is wrong can be very frustrating. We
usually try to fix bugs as soon as possible, especially when they are
critical and make an app unfunctional. Time is an important factor in
that process and we usually have to be agile to quickly solve the issues.
However, debugging React Native is not very straightforward, as the
issue you are trying to solve may occur on different levels. Namely, it
may be caused by:
• JavaScript - your application’s code or React Native,
• Native code - third-party libraries or React Native itself.

When it comes to debugging native code, you have to use the tools
built into Android Studio and Xcode.

When it comes to debugging JavaScript code, you may encounter sev-

eral difficulties. The first and most naive way to debug is to write con-
sole.logs in your code and check the logs in the terminal. This method
works for solving trivial bugs only or when following the divide and
conquer technique. In all other cases, you may need to use an external
debugger.

By default, React Native ships with built-in debugging utilities.

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The most common one is Google Chrome Debugger. It allows you to

set breakpoints in your code or preview logs in a handier way than in
a terminal. Unfortunately, using the
Chrome Debugger may lead to hard-to-spot issues. It’s because your
code is executed in Chrome’s V8 engine instead of a platform-specific
engine, such as JSC or Hermes.

The instructions generated in Chrome are sent via Websocket to the

emulator or device. It means that you cannot really use the debugger
to profile your app so it detects the performance issues. It can give you
a rough idea of what might cause the issues, but
you will not be able to debug the real cause due to the overhead of
WebSocket message passing.

Another inconvenience is the fact that you cannot easily debug network
requests with the Chrome Debugger (it needs additional setup and still
has its limitations). In order to debug all possible requests, you have
to open a dedicated network debugger using the emulator’s developer
menu. However, its interface is very small and inconvenient due to the
size of the emulator’s screen.

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From the developer menu, you can access other debugging utilities,
such as layout inspector or performance monitor. The latter is relatively
convenient to use, as it’s displaying only a small piece of information.
However, employing the former is a struggle because of the limited
workspace it provides.

Spending more time on debugging and finding per-

formance issues means a worse developer experience
and less satisfaction
Unlike native developers, the ones working with React Native have ac-
cess to a wide range of debugging tools and techniques. Each originates
from a different ecosystem, such as iOS, Android, or JS. While it may
sound great at first, you need to remember that every tool requires a
different level of expertise in the native development. That makes the
choice challenging for the vast majority of JavaScript developers.

Inconvenient tooling usually decreases the velocity of the team and

frustrates its members. As a result, they are not as effective as they
could be, affecting the quality of the app and making the releases less
frequent.

Solution: Turn on Flipper and start debugging.

Wouldn’t it be great to have one comprehensive tool to handle all of the
above use cases? Of course, it would! And that’s where Flipper comes
into play!

Flipper is a debugging platform for mobile apps. It also supports React

Native as its first-class citizen. Launched in September 2019, Flipper
has been shipped by default with React Native since version 0.62.

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Source: https://fbflipper.com/docs/features/react-native

It is a desktop app with a convenient interface, which directly integrates

with your application’s JS and native code. This means that you no lon-
ger have to worry about JS runtime differences and the performance
caveats of using the Chrome Debugger. It comes with a network inspec-
tor, React DevTools, and even a native view hierarchy tool.

What’s more, Flipper lets you preview logs from native code and track
native crashes, so you don’t have to run Android Studio or Xcode to
check what is happening on the native side!

Flipper is easily extensible, so there is a high chance it will be enriched

with a wide range of useful plugins developed by the community. At this
point, you can use Flipper for tasks such as detecting memory leaks,
previewing the content of Shared Preferences, or inspecting loaded
images. Additionally, Flipper for React Native is shipped with React

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DevTools, Hermes debugger, and Metro bundler integration.

What’s most exciting is that all the needed utilities are placed in one
desktop app. This minimizes context switches. Without Flipper, a de-
veloper debugging an issue related to displaying the data fetched from
the backend had to use the Chrome Debugger (to preview logs), in-em-
ulator network requests debugger, and probably in-emulator layout
inspector, or a standalone React Devtools app. With Flipper, all those
tools are available as built-in plugins. They are easily accessible from
a side panel and have similar UI and UX.

Benefits: You have more fun working with React Native

and establish a better feedback loop.
A better debugging process makes your app development cycle faster
and more predictable. As a result, your team is able to produce more
reliable code and spot any kind of issues much easier.

Having all the debugging utilities in one interface is definitely ergonomic

and does not disrupt any interactions with an emulator or device. The
process will be less burdensome for your team and that will positively
impact the velocity of the product development and bug fixing.

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Avoid unused
native dependencies
Avoid unused native dependencies The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Improve the Time to Interactive of

your app by removing the linking
of unused dependencies.
Issue: You have a lot of dependencies in your project
but you don’t know if you need all of them
Every bit of native code we use in our apps has a runtime cost asoci-
ated with reading, loading, and executing said code. The more native
dependencies our apps have, the slower it is for apps to start, which
impacts the TTI (Time to Interactive) metric. And makes your users
wait more to start interacting with your app.

In our React Native apps, we often rely on dependencies that load Ko-
tlin, Java, Swift, ObjectiveC, JavaScript, and recently more often, even
C++. Those dependencies are declared in the package.json file, which
allows for a JavaScript bundler to correctly discover and, well, bundle
their JS parts into the final application. It may be counterintuitive at
first, but this declaration in the JavaScript toolchain influences the na-
tive side as well. And the reason for that is the “autolinking” feature of
the React Native CLI.

Autolinking allows us to link native dependencies in React Native au-

tomatically, without ever touching native toolings like Cocoapods and
Gradle. If you’re not familiar with how the Android or iOS toolchain works
in terms of using external dependencies, you might be asking “What’s
linking native dependencies?” When dealing with native binaries, be it
either in C/C++, ObjectiveC, or Java, linking is a way for the native tool-
chain to understand where to find the actual code that’s associated with
the 3rd-party dependency we want our code to use. What’s important
is that it’s necessary and for a long time we, React Native developers,
needed to do this step manually. Since React Native 0.60, we have an
automated way of doing this thanks to the React Native CLI.

One important thing to know about how autolinking works is that it

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crawls your package.json and then node_modules in search of native

code. The tool doesn’t know whether you’re actively using the library
that ships native code or not. It will be linked anyway. What does this
mean? All the native dependencies will be linked and available in our
app bundle. As a result, we’ll end up with an increased bundle size and
degraded TTI, as the mobile OS will spend more time loading the native
binaries, showing your users a splash screen a bit longer.

Solution: Find and remove unused dependencies.

To find the unused dependencies in our project, we can use the dep-
check library. It’s a great tool for analyzing the project’s dependencies
to see how each one of them is used, which dependencies are use-
less, and which dependencies are missing from package.json. To use
depcheck, we need to run npx depcheck in the root of our project. An
example of the results looks like this:

Unused dependencies
* lottie-react-native
* react-native-gesture-handler
* react-native-maps
* react-natave-reanimated
* react-native-video
* react-native-webview

Unused devDependencies
* @babel/core
* @babel/runtime
* @react-native-community/eslint-config
* @tsconfig/react-native
* @types/jest
* @types/react-test-renderer
* babel-jest
* jest-circus
* metro-react-native-paper-preset
* typescript

Example output of the depcheck library

Dev dependencies likely won’t end up in the JS bundle unless there is

any native code inside, so in this example, there is no need to focus on
them. But the results can show us that we have a few unused depen-
dencies - and what’s more important, in this case, these dependencies

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are relying on some native code. Now we have to remove them and it’s
done! In the example app, removing unused dependencies from the
screenshot above occurred with the following result in the bundle size:

Comparision of bundle sizes before and after removing unused native dependencies

It’s worth mentioning that on the Android device, there was a noticeable
improvement in the Time to Interactive, which was reduced by 17% in
this case.
You may be wondering how we can measure the TTI. There are a few
ways to do it. Whichever you choose, remember to always measure
on a release version of the app when dealing with absolute numbers.

One way is to use a stopwatch and measure the time the app took to
show the first screen, as shown here. It’s entirely manual, but it will
often get the job done for one-off measurements.

If we want to get a more detailed output, we can make use of Perfetto

for Android. For iOS, we can enable Perf Monitor from the DevMenu
and double-tap on the monitor window to expand. The output will look
like this:

Performance monitor on the iOS simulator

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We can also use App launch from Xcode instruments. All you need is to
install a release build through profiling to your real device. Then select
App Launch from the window that will appear automatically once the
build is installed. Hit the record button, and once the app has launched,

Example usage of Xcode’s App Launch tool

stop recording. You will get an output similar to this:

There are two phases when calculating app launch time on iOS. The first
one is called pre-main time, and it’s the time before the main function
of the app is executed. It’s marked with the purple area on the graph
above - all the work needed to launch the app correctly, like initialization
and the linking of libraries happens in this phase.

The second phase, called post-main-time, is the time between executing

the app’s main function and presenting the first interactable view to the
user. It’s marked with the green color on the graph above. The total app
launch time is the sum of both of these metrics. If you want to learn
more about testing app launch time, here’s a good read on this topic.

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It’s worth mentioning that there are lots of third-party tools helping de-
velopers to gain a bunch of performance information from apps already
submitted to Google Play and App Store. The most popular are Firebase
Performance Monitoring, Sentry, and DataDog. The key advantage of
using one of these tools is gaining data about performance from many
different devices.

Benefits: A smaller bundle size and faster

Time to Interactive.
Removing a few unused native dependencies ended up reducing both
the size of the app bundle and TTI by around 17%. Providing only
resources needed by the app can improve the Time to Interactive metric,
making users less likely to uninstall your app from their devices due to
excessive load time.

It’s worth remembering that although autolinking is a great and pow-

erful feature, it can be overzealous when it comes to linking code our
app doesn’t really use. Make sure to keep your dependencies up to date
and clean up unused ones during refactorings.

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Optimize your
application startup
time with Hermes
Optimize your application startup time with Hermes The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Achieve a better performance of

your apps with Hermes.
Issue: You’re loading a lot of Android packages during
the startup time which is unnecessary. Also, you’re using
an engine that is not optimized for mobile.
Users expect applications to be responsive and load fast. Apps that
fail to meet these requirements can end up receiving bad ratings in the
App Store or Play Store. In the most extreme situations, they can even
get abandoned in favor of their competition.

There is no single definition of the startup time. It’s because there are
many different stages of the loading phase that can affect how “fast”
or “slow” the app feels. For example, in the Lighthouse report, there are
eight performance metrics used to profile your web application. One
of them is Time to Interactive (TTI), which measures the time until the
application is ready for the first interaction.

There are quite a few things that happen from the moment you press
the application icon from the drawer for the first time.
1 2 3 4
Native Render JS Render JS Init + Require Native Init

The loading process starts with a native initialization which loads the
JavaScript VM and initializes all the native modules (1 in the above
diagram). It then continues to read the JavaScript from the disk and
loads it into the memory, parses, and starts executing (2 in the above
diagram). The details of this operation were discussed earlier in the
section about choosing the right libraries for your application.

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In the next step, React Native starts loading React components and
sends the final set of instructions to the UIManager (3 in the above
diagram). Finally, the UIManager processes the information received
from JavaScript and starts executing the native instructions that will
result in the final native interface (4 in the above diagram).

As you can see in the diagram below, there are two groups of operations
that influence the overall startup time of your application.

1 2 3 4
Native Render JS Render JS Init + Require Native Init

The first one involves the first two operations (1 and 2 in the diagram
above) and describes the time needed for React Native to bootstrap
(to spin up the VM and for the VM to execute the JavaScript code). The
other one includes the remaining operations (3 and 4 in the diagram
above) and is associated with the business logic that you have created
for your application. The length of this group is highly dependent on the
number of components and the overall complexity of your application.

This section focuses on the first group – the improvements related to

your configuration and not the business logic itself.

If you have not measured the overall startup time of your application
or have not played around with things such as Hermes yet - keep on
reading.

Long startup times and slow UX can be one of the rea-

sons your app gets a bad rating and ends up being
abandoned.

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Creating applications that are fun to play with is extremely important,

especially considering how saturated the mobile market already is.
Now, all mobile apps have to be not only intuitive, they also should be
pleasant to interact with.

There is a common misconception that React Native applications come

with a performance trade-off compared to their native counterparts.
The truth is that with enough attention and configuration tweaks, they
can load just as fast and without any considerable difference.

Solution: Turn on Hermes to benefit from a better

performance.
While a React Native application takes care of a native interface, it still
requires JavaScript logic to be running at runtime. To do so, it spins off
its own JavaScript virtual machine. Until recently, it used JavaScript-
Core (JSC). This engine is a part of WebKit—which powers the Safari
browser—and by default is only available on iOS. For a long time, it made
sense for React Native to use JSC for running JavaScript on Android as
well. It’s because using the V8 engine (that ships with Chrome) could
potentially increase the differences between Android and iOS, and make
sharing the code between the platforms way more difficult.

JavaScript engines need to perform various complicated operations.

They constantly ship new heuristics to improve the overall performance,
including the time needed to load the code and then execute it. To do
so, they benchmark common JavaScript operations and challenge the
CPU and memory needed to complete this process.
Most of the work of developers handling the JavaScript engines is
being tested against the most popular websites, such as Facebook
or Twitter. It is not a surprise that React Native uses JavaScript in a
different way. For example, the JavaScript engine made for the web
doesn’t have to worry much about the startup time. The browser will
most likely already be running at the time of loading a page. Because
of that, the engine can shift its attention to the overall CPU and mem-
ory consumption, as web applications can perform a lot of complex
operations and computations, including 3D graphics.

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As you could see on the performance diagram presented in the pre-

vious section, the JavaScript virtual machine consumes a big chunk
of the app’s total loading time. Unfortunately, there is little you can do
about it unless you build your own engine. That’s what the Meta team
ended up doing.

Meet Hermes - a JavaScript engine made specifically with React Native

in mind. It is optimized for mobile and focuses on relatively CPU-in-
sensitive metrics, such as application size and memory consumption.
Chances are you’re already using it! As of v0.70, React Native has been
shipping with Hermes turned on by default. Which marks an important
milestone in the engine’s stability.
It’s come a long way from the bare-bones Android-only engine open-
sourced in 2019, with a carefully curated set of supported JS fea-
tures—due to size constraints—through finding low-size-footprint ways
of adding more EcmaScript spec features, like Proxies and Intl, until
making it available for macOS and iOS.

Today Hermes is still small enough (~2 MB) to provide significant im-
provements to apps’ TTI and gives us a set of features rich enough to
be used in most of the apps out there.

Before we go into the details of enabling Hermes in existing React

Native applications, let’s take a look at some of its key architectural
decisions.

Bytecode precompilation
Typically, the traditional JavaScript VM works by parsing the JavaScript
source code during the runtime and then producing the bytecode. As
a result, the execution of the code is delayed until the parsing com-
pletes. It is not the same with Hermes. To reduce the time needed for
the engine to execute the business logic, it generates the bytecode
during the build time.

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Transpile

It can spend more time optimizing the bundle using various techniques
to make it smaller and more efficient. For example, the generated by-
tecode is designed in a way so that it can be mapped in the memory
without eagerly loading the entire
file. Optimizing that process brings significant TTI improvements as
I/O operations on mobile devices tend to increase the overall latency.

No JIT
The majority of modern browser engines use just-in-time (JIT) com-
pilers. It means that the code is translated and executed line-by-line.
However, the JIT compiler keeps track of warm code segments (the
ones that appear a few times) and hot code segments (the ones that
run many times). These frequently occurring code segments are then
sent to a compiler that, depending on how many times they appear in
the program, compiles them to the machine code and, optionally, per-
forms some optimizations.

Hermes, unlike the other engines, is an AOT(ahead-of-time) engine. It

means that the entire bundle is compiled to bytecode ahead of time.
As a result, certain optimizations that JIT compilers would perform on
hot code segments are not present.

On one hand, it makes the Hermes bundles underperform in bench-

marks that are CPU-oriented. However, these benchmarks are not re-
ally comparable to a real-life mobile app experience, where TTI and
application size takes priority.

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On the other hand, JIT engines decrease the TTI as they need time to
parse the bundle and execute it in time. They also need time to “warm
up”. Namely, they have to run the code a couple of times to detect the
common patterns and begin to optimize them.

If you want to start using Hermes on Android, make sure to turn the
enableHermes flag in android/app/build.gradle to true:

project.ext.react = [
entryFile: "index.js",
enableHermes: true
]

For iOS, turn the hermes_enabled flag to true in ios/Podfile:

use_react_native!(
:path => config[:reactNativePath],
# to enable hermes on iOS, change `false` to `true` and
then install pods
:hermes_enabled => true
)

In both cases, whenever you switch the Hermes flag, make sure to re-
build the project according to instructions provided in the native files.
Once your project is rebuilt, you can now enjoy a faster app boot time
and likely smaller app size.

Benefits: A better startup time leads to a better

performance. It’s a never-ending story.
Making your application load fast is an ongoing effort and its final
result will depend on many factors. You can control some of them by
tweaking both your application’s configuration and the tools it uses to
compile the source code.

Turning Hermes on is one of the things that you can do today to

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drastically improve certain performance metrics of your app, mainly

the TTI.

Apart from that, you can also look into other significant improvements
shipped by the Meta team. To do so, get familiar with their write-up on
React Native performance. It is often a game of gradual improvements
that make all the difference when applied at once. The React Native
core team has created a visual report on benchmarking between stock
RN and Hermes-enabled RN: see here.

As we have mentioned in the section on running the latest React Native,

Hermes is one of those assets that you can leverage as long as you
stay up to date with your React Native version.

Doing so will help your application stay on top of the performance game
and let it run at a maximum speed.

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Optimize your
Android application’s
size with these
Gradle settings
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Improve TTI and reduce memory

usage and the size of your app
by adjusting Proguard rules to
your projects.
Issue: You are not enabling Proguard for release builds
and creating APK with code for all CPU architectures.
You ship a larger APK.
At the beginning of each React Native project, you usually don’t care
about the application size. After all, it is hard to make such predictions
so early in the process. But it takes only a few additional dependencies
for the application to grow from a standard 5 MB to 10, 20, or even 50
MB, depending on the codebase.

Should you really care about app size in the era of super-fast mobile
internet and WiFi access everywhere? Why does a bundle size grow so
rapidly? We will answer those questions in this section. But first, let’s
have a look at what a typical React Native bundle is made of.

By default, a React Native application on Android consists of:

• four sets of binaries compiled for different CPU architectures,
• a directory with resources such as images, fonts, etc.,
• a JavaScript bundle with business logic and your React components,
• other files.

React Native offers some optimizations that allow you to improve the
structure of the bundle and its overall size. But they are disabled by
default.

If you are not using them effectively, especially when your application
grows, you are unnecessarily increasing the overall size of your appli-
cation in bytes. That can have a negative impact on the experience of

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your end users. We discuss it in the next section.

A bigger APK size means more time needed to down-

load from the app store and more bytecode to load into
memory
It’s great that you and your team operate on the latest devices and
have fast and stable access to the internet. But you need to remem-
ber that not everyone has the same luxury. There are still parts of the
world where network accessibility and reliability are far from perfect.
Projects such as Starlink already improve that situation, but that will
take time to cover the most remote areas out there.

Right now, there are still markets where every megabyte of traffic has
its price. In those regions, the application’s size directly impacts the
conversion, and the installation/ cancellation ratio increases along
with the app size.
Install rate, varying app size

Source: https://segment.com/blog/mobile-app-size-effect-on-downloads/

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It is also a common belief that every well crafted and carefully designed
application not only provides a beautiful interface but is also optimized
for the end device. Well, that is not always the case. And because the
Android market is so competitive, there is a big chance that a smaller
alternative to those beautiful yet large apps is already gaining more
traction from the community.

Another important factor is device fragmentation. The Android market

is very diverse in that respect. There are more than 20 popular manu-
facturers, each releasing an array of devices every year. Contributing to
a relatively significant share of mid to low-end devices, which account
for over 60% of all smartphone sales annually. And those devices may
face issues when dealing with bigger APKs.

As we have stressed already, the startup time of your application is

essential. The more code the device has to execute while opening up
your code, the longer it takes to launch the app and make it ready for
the first interaction.

Now, let’s move to the last factor worth mentioning in this context –
device storage.

Apps usually end up taking up more space after the installation. Some-
times they may even not fit into the device's memory. In such a situation,
users may decide to skip installing your product if that would mean
removing other resources such as applications or images.

Solution: Flip the boolean flag enableProguardInRe-

leaseBuilds to true, adjust the Proguard rules to your
needs, and test release builds for crashes. Also, flip
enableSeparateBuildPerCPUArchitecture to true.
Android is an operating system that runs on plenty of devices with dif-
ferent architectures, so your build must support most of them. React
Native supports four: armeabi-v7a, arm64-v8a, x86, and x86_64.

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While developing your application, Gradle generates the APK file that
can be installed on any of the mentioned CPU architectures. In other
words, your APK (the file outputted from the build process) is actually
four separate applications packaged into a single file with .apk exten-
sion. This makes testing easier as the application can be distributed
onto many different testing devices at once.

Unfortunately, this approach has its drawbacks. The overall size of the
application is now much bigger than it should be as it contains the files
required by all architectures. As a result, users will end up downloading
extraneous code that is not even compatible with their phones.

Thankfully, you can optimize the distribution process by taking advan-

tage of App Bundles when releasing a production version of your app.

App Bundle is a publishing format that allows you to contain all com-
piled code and resources. It’s all due to the fact that Google Play Store
Dynamic Delivery will later build tailored APKs depending on the end
users’ devices.

To build App Bundle, you have to simply invoke a different script than
usual. Instead of using ./gradlew assembleRelease, use ./gradlew
bundleRelease, as presented here:
The main advantage of the Android App Bundle over builds for multiple

cd android

./gradlew bundleRelease

Building a React Native app as App Bundle

architectures per CPU is the ease of delivery. After all, you have to ship
only one artifact and Dynamic Delivery will do all the magic for you. It
also gives you more flexibility on supported platforms.
You don’t have to worry about which CPU architecture your end user’s
device has. The average size reduction for an app is around 35%, but in

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some cases, it can be even cut in half, according to the Android team.

Source: https://medium.com/google-developer-experts/exploring-the-android-app-bundle-ca16846fa3d7

Another way of decreasing the build size is by enabling Proguard.

Proguard works in a similar way to dead code elimination from JavaS-
cript - it gets rid of the unused code from third-party SDKs and minifies
the codebase.

However, Proguard may not work out-of-the-box with some projects

and usually requires an additional setup to achieve optimal results. In
this example, we were able to reduce the size of the mentioned 28 MB
build by 700 KB. It is not much, but it is still an improvement.

def enableProguardInReleaseBuilds = true

Enabling proguard in android/app/build gradle

Another good practice is keeping your eye on resources optimization.

Each application contains some svg or png graphics that can be opti-
mized using free web tools.

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Reducing redundant text from svg and compressing png images can
save some bytes when your project has already too many of them.

Benefits: A smaller APK, slightly faster TTI, and slightly

less memory used.
All the mentioned steps are worth taking when you’re struggling with a
growing application size. You will achieve the most significant
size reduction by building the app for different architectures. But the
list of possible optimizations doesn’t stop there.

By striving for a smaller APK size, you will do your best to reduce the
download cancellation rate. Also, your customers will benefit from a
shorter Time To Interactive and be more inclined to use the app more
often.

Finally, you will demonstrate that you care about every user, not only
those with top-notch devices and fast internet connections. The big-
ger your platform gets, the more important it is to support those minor
groups, as every percent of users translates into hundreds of thousands
of actual users. If you’d like to learn more about optimizing Android,
check the Android Profiling chapter.

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Experiment with
the New Architecture
of React Native
Experiment with the New Architecture of React Native The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Leverage the capabilities of the new

rendering system inside your app.
Issue: Your app is using old architecture without the con-
current features of React 18.
Maybe it’s better to say “current” architecture since it’s still mostly
used by production apps. This term refers to React Native’s underlying
rendering system (and how it works). Both new and old architecture is
based on the communication between JavaScript and the native side.
Currently, this communication is handled by the bridge. Let’s go over
its limitations in order to easier understand the problems that the New
Architecture is trying to solve.

• It is asynchronous: the JavaScript side submits data to a bridge and

waits for the data to be processed by the native side
• It’s single-threaded (that’s why it’s important to not overload the JS
thread and execute animations on the UI thread).
• It adds additional overhead when it comes to the serialization
of data from JSON objects.

The bridge is still working fine for most use cases. However, when we
start to send a lot of data over the bridge, it may become a bottleneck
for our app. This problem can be seen when rendering a lot of com-
ponents in a long list. In the case when the user scrolls fast, there will
be a blank space caused by the communication between the JS and
native sides being asynchronous. Essentially what happens is that we
are having a “traffic jam” on our bridge with objects waiting to be seri-
alized. The same issue with the bridge being “overloaded” can be seen
in native modules sending a lot of data back and forth.

This bottleneck is the main thing that the new rendering system is try-
ing to solve. However, not everything about the New Architecture is as
good as it seems. We will also get into the drawbacks that it brings.

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Solution: Migrate your app to New

Architecture.
What is New Architecture?
Starting from React Native 0.68, developers can leverage new capa-
bilities of the framework. Mainly the New Architecture consists of two
pillars: Fabric and TurboModules. The first one is a new rendering sys-
tem and the second one is a new way of writing native modules. We
will get into the details later in this section.
There are also two more that are essential to understanding how New
Architecture works. The first, Codegen drastically improves DX by gen-
erating a lot of native boilerplate code. And the second, JSI, is a C++
API that interacts with any JS engine.
Note: Prior to React Native v0.70.5+, while possible, it was harder to
deploy the New Architecture in an app. So that’s the version we are
suggesting for you to upgrade.

Codegen
A code generation tool that makes JS a source of truth by automating
the compatibility between the JS and native sides. It allows for writing
statically typed JS (called JS Spec) which is then used to generate the
interface files needed by Fabric native components and TurboMod-
ules. Spec consists of a set of types written in TypeScript or Flow that
defines all the APIs provided by the native module. Codegen ensures
type-safety as well as compile-time type safety, which means smaller
code and faster execution as both realms can trust each other around
validating the data every time. To find out more about it, refer to the docs.

JSI
JSI is the foundation of the New Architecture, a C++ API for interacting
with any JS engine. In contrast to the bridge which was asynchronous,

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JSI is synchronous which allows for invoking native functions faster.

It lets JavaScript to hold references to C++ host objects and invoke
methods directly on them. This removes the major overhead of asyn-
chronous communication between JS and native by serializing objects
using the bridge.

Fabric
Fabric is React Native's new concurrent rendering system, a conceptual
evolution of the legacy render system. The core principle is to unify
more render logic in C++ to better leverage interoperability between
platforms. Host Components like View, Text, etc. are now lazily initial-
ized, resulting in faster startups.
Fabric allows us to take advantage of the features introduced in React
18. Instead of the bridge, we can use JSI which is synchronous by de-
fault. For the time being, React Native is not removing the bridge com-
pletely; it’s still available so developers can gradually adopt the New
Architecture and JSI. However, using the bridge needs to be explicitly
stated (by importing it), so modules not yet migrated won’t work. Meta
is planning to soon allow apps to run in a completely bridge-less mode.

TurboModules
This is a new way of writing native modules that also leverages the
power of JSI, allowing for synchronous, and an order of magnitude
faster data transfer from native to JS and vice versa. It is a rewrite
of the communication layer between JavaScript and platform native
modules like Bluetooth, Biometrics, etc. It also allows for writing native
code for both platforms using C++ and introduces the lazy loading of
modules to speed up your app startup time.

How to turn on New Architecture

In order to turn on the New Architecture in your app, you need to up-
date your app to at least React Native 0.68, however, we recommend

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upgrading to at least React Native 0.70.5+ because a lot of improve-

ments have been added.
To migrate your app to the New Architecture, follow these steps:
1. Upgrade your app to at least React Native 0.70.5+, you can use
https://react-native-community.github.io/upgrade-helper/
2. Check all third-party libraries that your app is depending on and the
important thing is that: all of them need to be migrated! This might
be a long-time blocker for a lot of apps out there. Components that
are not yet compatible will show a red box - Unimplemented com-
ponent: <ComponentName> - and you will likely notice them. In that
case, please let the library maintainers know about it, as this will
speed up the adoption.
3. [Android] Set newArchEnabled=true in gradle.properties.
4. [iOS] Run RCT_NEW_ARCH_ENABLED=1 pod install inside the iOS
folder.

Benefits: You are able to leverage all the latest features

including React 18, Fabric, TurboModules, and JSI.
Now that you know the basics of how the New Architecture works,
let’s go over the benefits.

Performance
Due to the synchronous nature of the New Architecture, there will be
some performance improvements while communicating with the native
side. However, not every scenario proves this, in some of the bench-
marks the New Architecture performance is worse.
Meta’s goal was not to make the New Architecture X times faster than
the old one. They wanted to get rid of the major bottlenecks blocking
them from adding new features to the framework. The migration of the
Facebook app took over a year and they haven’t noticed any significant
performance improvements or regressions that are perceivable by the
end user. However, this doesn’t mean that performance improvements
won’t come in the future. Now that they reworked internals, they have
a great foundation to build upon.

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Let’s go over some performance benchmarks by Alexandre Moureaux

from BAM. Here is the link to the source: https://github.com/reactwg/
react-native-new-architecture/discussions/85

Benchmark of rendering 10K views

In this case, the New Architecture proves that it’s more efficient than
the old one. Using on average less CPU but more RAM.

Benchmark of rendering 2K Text components

In this scenario, the old architecture is faster, mainly because of heavier
UI thread consumption.

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The official response from the React Native team is that their internal
benchmarks while rolling out the New Architecture to users was neutral
across all React Native surfaces in the Facebook app on both Android
and iOS. As stated by Samuel Susla in this discussion thread, “In the
last years, we conducted dozens of tests in production on millions of
devices to assure performance was neutral.”

So in most use cases, you can expect a neutral performance impact

without any performance regressions. And keep in mind that the New
Architecture is getting better every single day with many developers
contributing to the repository, so the results may be totally different by
the time you are reading this.

Future readiness
This allows your app to leverage Concurrent React features, which im-
prove UI responsiveness, Suspense for data fetching to handle complex
UI loading schemes, and any further React innovations built on top of
its new concurrent engine introduced in React 18.
Here is a discussion about the startTransition (React 18) feature being
used in React Native, however, the author of the post didn’t see any
benefits compared to the web: https://github.com/reactwg/react-na-
tive-new-architecture/discussions/94

Let’s see how we can leverage React18’s startTransition API in order

to prioritize between two state updates. In our example, a button click
can be considered an urgent update whereas the NonUrgentUI can
be considered a non-urgent update. To tell React about a non-urgent
update, we can wrap the setState in the startTransition API. This
allows React to prepare a new UI and show the old UI until a new one
is prepared. In our example, we wrapped setNonUrgentValue in start-
Transition and told React that nonUrgentValue is a transition and
not so urgent, it may take some time. We’ve also added a conditional
backgroundColor. When you run this example, you will see that once
you click on the button, the view will retain its old UI for e.g., if we start
at value 1, the UI will be green. Once you click on the button, the Value

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text UI will be updated but the UI for the container will still remain green
until the transition is completed and the color will change to red due
to the new UI being rendered. That’s the magic of React’s concurrent
rendering.
To understand it better, assume that wrapping an update in startTran-
sition renders it in a different universe. We don’t see that universe
directly but we can get a signal from it using the isPending variable
returned from the useTransition hook. Once the new UI is ready, both
universes merge together to show the final UI.

import React from 'react';

import { Button, StyleSheet, Text, View } from 'react-native';

const dummyData = Array(10000).fill(1);

const NonUrgentUI = ({ value, isPending }) => {

const backgroundStyle = {
backgroundColor: value % 2 === 0 ? 'red' : 'green',
};

return (
<View>
<Text>Non urgent update value: {isPending ? 'PENDING' :
value}</Text>
<View style={[styles.container, backgroundStyle]}>
{dummyData.map((_, index) => (
<View key={index} style={styles.item} />
))}
</View>
</View>
);
};

const ConcurrentStartTransition = () => {

const [value, setValue] = React.useState(1);
const [nonUrgentValue, setNonUrgentValue] = React.
useState(1);
const [isPending, startTransition] = React.useTransition();

const handleClick = () => {

const newValue = value + 1;
setValue(newValue);
startTransition(() => {
setNonUrgentValue(newValue);
});
};
return (
<View>

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<Button onPress={handleClick} title="Increment value" />

<Text>Value: {value}</Text>
<NonUrgentUI value={nonUrgentValue} isPending={isPending}
/>
</View>
);
};

export default ConcurrentStartTransition;

const styles = StyleSheet.create({

container: {
flexDirection: 'row',
flexWrap: 'wrap',
},
item: {
width: 10,
height: 10,
},
});

To understand it better, let’s visualize the code snippet that we just

went through. The image below shows a comparison of when we use
startTransition and when we don’t. Looking at the image, we see
that React flushes the urgent update right off, which happens due to
calling setValue without wrapping it in startTransition. Next, we see
that React shows the old UI (viewed in green) for the UI that depends
on the nonurgent updates, which means the updates that are wrapped
in startTransition. We also see a Pending text displayed, this is a way
for React18 to tell us that the new UI depending on this state is not yet
ready. Once it’s ready, React flushes it and we don’t see the Pending
text anymore, and the view color changes to red.

On the other hand, if we don’t use startTransition, React tries to handle

both updates as urgent and flushes once both are ready. This certainly
has a few downsides, such as the app trying to render some heavy UI
all at once which may cause jarring effects for the users. With React18,
we can handle this by delaying the updates that are not urgent.

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There are some other noticeable features in React18 that you might
want to check out by playing with the linked sandboxes from React’s of-
ficial website. See useDeferredValue and startTransition with Suspense.

Maintenance & Support

The React Native core team can only support as many as 3 of the latest
versions of React Native. And the React core team plans new features
built on the concurrent rendering engine.
It’s important not to fall behind, as the cost of paying the tech debt in
the form of React and React Native being far behind the current version,
will get higher in time.

The Meta team has a dedicated capacity to help the community solve
their app and library problems regarding New Architecture adoption.
It’s worth starting your migration early so you can identify the problems
and blockers that your app may be facing.

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2023 is the best time to plan and start executing the adoption of the
New Architecture. You can get a head start with the fine support from
the Meta engineers in solving your app’s build and runtime issues that
prevent you from migration.

If you need help with performance,

stability, user experience, or other
complex issues - contact us!
As React Native Core Contributors and leaders of the
community, we will be happy to help.

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PA RT 3

How to ship quicker with a stable

development environment
React Native is great for shipping fast and with
confidence, but are you ready for that?
These days, having a stable and comfortable development setup that
encourages shipping new features and doesn’t slow you down is a must.
You have to ship fast and be ahead of your competitors.

React Native plays really well in such environments. For example, one
of its biggest selling points is that it allows you to ship updates to your
applications without undergoing the App Store submission. They’re
called Over-the-Air (OTA) updates.

The question is: is your application ready for that? Does your develop-
ment pipeline accelerate the development and shipping features with
React Native?

Most of the time, you would like the answer to be simply yes. But in
reality, it gets complicated.

In this section, we present some of the best practices and recommenda-

tions that allow you to ship your apps faster and with more confidence.
And it’s not just about turning on the Over-the-Air updates, as most
articles suggest. It’s about building a steady and healthy development
environment where React Native shines and accelerates innovation.

And that’s what this part of our guide is all about.

 The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

PA RT 3 | C H A P T E R 1

Run tests for key

pieces of your app
Run tests for key pieces of your app The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Focus testing on key pieces of the

app to have a better overview of
new features and tweaks.
Issue: You don’t write tests at all or write low-quality
tests with no real coverage, and you only rely on manual
testing.
Building and deploying apps with confidence is a challenging task.
However, verifying if everything actually works requires a lot of time
and effort – no matter if it is automated or not. Having somebody who
manually verifies that the software works as expected is vital for your
product.

Unfortunately, this process doesn’t scale well as the amount of your

app functionalities grow. It also doesn’t provide direct feedback to the
developers who write the code.
Because of that, it increases the time needed to spot and fix a bug.

So what do the developers do to make sure their software is always

production-ready and doesn’t rely on human testers? They write auto-
mated tests. And React Native is no exception. You can write a variety
of tests both for your JS code – which contains the business logic and
UI – and the native code that is used underneath.

You can do it by utilizing end-to-end testing frameworks, spinning up

simulators, emulators, or even real devices. One of the great features
of React Native is that it bundles to a native app bundle, so it allows
you to employ all the end-to-end testing frameworks that you love and
use in your native projects.

But beware, writing a test may be a challenging task on its own, espe-
cially if you lack experience. You might end up with a test that doesn’t
have a good coverage of your features. Or only to test positive behavior,

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Run tests for key pieces of your app The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

without handling exceptions. It’s very common to encounter low-quality

tests that don’t provide too much value and hence, won’t boost your
confidence in shipping the code.

Whichever kind of test you’re going to write, be it unit, integration, or

E2E (short for end-to-end), there’s a golden rule that will save you from
writing the bad ones. And the rule is to “avoid testing implementation
details.” Stick to it and your test will start to provide value over time.
You can’t move as fast as your competition, chances of regressions are
high, and apps can be removed from stores when receiving bad reviews.
The main goal of testing your code is to deploy it with confidence by
minimizing the number of bugs you introduce in your codebase. And
not shipping bugs to the users is especially important for mobile apps,
which are usually published in app stores.

Because of that, they are a subject of a lengthy review process, which

may take from a few hours up to a few days. And the last thing you want
is to frustrate your users with an update that makes your app faulty.
That could lead to lower ratings and, in extreme cases, even taking the
app down from the store.

Such scenarios may seem pretty rare, but they happen. Then, your team
may become so afraid of having another regression and crash that it
will lose its velocity and confidence.

Solution: Don’t aim at 100% coverage, focus on key piec-

es of the app. Test mostly integration.
Running tests is not a question of “if” but “how”. You need to come up
with a plan on how to get the best value for the time spent. It’s very
difficult to have 100% lines of your code and dependencies covered.
Also, it’s often quite impractical.

Most of the mobile apps out there don’t need a full test coverage of
the code they write.

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The exceptions are situations in which the client requires full coverage
because of the government regulations they must abide by. But in such
cases, you’re probably already aware of the problem.

It’s crucial for you to focus your time on testing the right thing. Learn-
ing to identify business-critical features and capabilities is usually
more important than writing a test itself. After all, you want to boost
confidence in your code, not write a test for the sake of it. Once you
do that, all you need to do is decide on how to run it. You have quite a
few options to choose from.

In React Native, your app consists of multiple layers of code, some

written in JS, some in Java/Kotlin, some in Objective-C/Swift, and some
even in C++, which is gaining adoption in the React Native core.

Therefore, for practical reasons, we can distinguish between:

• JavaScript testing – with the help of the Jest framework. In the

context of React Native, if you think about “unit” or “integration”
tests, this is the category they eventually fall into. From a practical
standpoint, there is no reason for distinguishing between those
two groups.
• End-to-end app testing – with the help of Detox, Appium, or another
mobile testing framework you’re familiar with.

Because most of your business code lives in JS, it makes sense to

focus your efforts there.

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Testing pyramid. Source: https://twitter.com/aaronabramov_/status/805913874704674816

Testing trophy. Source: https://twitter.com/kentcdodds/status/960723172591992832

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JavaScript testing
Writing tests for utility functions should be pretty straightforward. To
do so, you can use your favorite test runner. The most popular and rec-
ommended one within the React Native community is Jest. We’ll also
be referring to it in the following sections.

For testing React components, you need more advanced tools though.
Let’s take the following component as an example:

import React, { useState } from 'react';

import {
View,
Text,
TouchableOpacity,
TextInput,
ScrollView,
} from 'react-native';

const QuestionsBoard = ({ questions, onSubmit }) => {

const [data, setData] = useState({});

return (
<ScrollView>
{questions.map((q, index) => {
return (
<View key={q}>
<Text>{q}</Text>
<TextInput
accessibilityLabel="answer input"
onChangeText={(text) => {
setData((state) => ({
...state,
[index + 1]: { q, a: text },
}));
}}
/>
</View>
);
})}
<TouchableOpacity onPress={() => onSubmit(data)}>
<Text>Submit</Text>
</TouchableOpacity>
</ScrollView>
);
};

export default QuestionsBoard;

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Run tests for key pieces of your app The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

It is a React component that displays a list of questions and allows for

answering them. You need to make sure that its logic works by check-
ing if the callback function is called with the set of answers provided
by the user.

To do so, you can use an official react-test-renderer library from the

React core team. It is a test renderer, in other words, it allows you to
render your component and interact with its lifecycle without actually
dealing with native APIs. Some people may find it intimidating and hard
to work with because of the low-level API.

That’s why the community around React Native came out with helper
libraries, such as React Native Testing Library, providing us with a good
set of helpers to productively write your high-quality tests.

A great thing about this library is that its API forces you to avoid test-
ing the implementation details of your components, making it more
resilient to internal refactors.

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Run tests for key pieces of your app The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

A test for the QuestionsBoard component would look like this:

import { render, screen, fireEvent } from '@testing-library/

react-native';
import { QuestionsBoard } from '../QuestionsBoard';

test('form submits two answers', () => {

const allQuestions = ['q1', 'q2'];
const mockFn = jest.fn();

render(<QuestionsBoard questions={allQuestions}
onSubmit={mockFn} />);

const answerInputs = screen.getAllByLabelText('answer

input');

fireEvent.changeText(answerInputs[0], 'a1');
fireEvent.changeText(answerInputs[1], 'a2');
fireEvent.press(screen.getByText('Submit'));

expect(mockFn).toBeCalledWith({
1: { q: 'q1', a: 'a1' },
2: { q: 'q2', a: 'a2' },
});
});

Test suite taken from the official RNTL documentation

You first render the QuestionsBoard component with your set of ques-
tions. Next, you query the tree by label text to access an array of ques-
tions, as displayed by the component. Finally, you set up the right
answers and press the submit button.

If everything goes well, your assertion should pass, ensuring that the
verifyQuestions function has been called with the right set of argu-
ments.

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Note: You may have also heard about a technique called

“snapshot testing” for JS. It can help you in some of the
testing scenarios, e.g. when working with structured
data that may change slightly between tests.
The technique is widely adopted in the React
ecosystem because of its built-in support from Jest.
If you’re into learning more about snapshot testing, check out the official
documentation on the Jest website. Make sure to read it thoroughly,
as toMatchSnapshot and toMatchInlineSnapshot are low-level APIs
that have many gotchas.

They may help you and your team quickly add coverage to the project.
And at the same time, snapshots make adding low-quality and hard-to-
maintain tests too easy. Using helper tools like eslint-plugin-jest with
its no-large-snapshots option, or snapshot-diff with its component
snapshot comparison feature for focused assertions, is a must-have
for any codebase that leverages this testing technique.

E2E tests
The cherry on top of our testing pyramid is a suite of end-to-end tests.
It’s good to start with a so-called “smoke test” – a test ensuring that
your app doesn’t crash on the first run. It’s crucial to have a test like this,
as it will help you avoid sending a faulty app to your users. Once you’re
done with the basics, you should use your E2E testing framework of
choice to cover the most important functionalities of your apps.

These can be, for instance, logging in (successfully or not), logging out,
accepting payments, and displaying lists of data you fetch from your
or third-party servers.

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Note: Beware that these tests are usually a bit harder to

set up than the JS ones.
Also, they are more likely to fail because of the issues related to e.g.
networking, file system operations or storage or memory shortage.
What’s more, they provide you with little information on why they do
it. This test’s quality (not only the E2E ones) is called “flakiness” and
should be avoided at all cost, as it lowers your confidence in the test
suite. That’s why it’s so important to divide testing assertions into
smaller groups, so it’s easier to debug what went wrong.

For the purpose of this section, we’ll be looking at Detox – the most
popular E2E test runner within the React Native community and a part
of the React Native testing pipeline. With Detox, you will be able to en-
sure that your framework of choice is supported by the latest React
Native versions. That is especially important in the context of future
changes that may happen at a framework level.

Before going any further, you have to install Detox. This process re-
quires you to take some additional “native steps” before you’re ready
to run your first suite. Follow the official documentation as the steps
are likely to change in the future.

Once you have successfully installed and configured Detox, you’re ready
to begin with your first test.

it('should display the questions', async () => {

await devicePixelRatio.reloadReactNative();

await element(by.text(allQuestions[0])).toBeVisible();
});

This quick snippet shown above would ensure that the first question
is displayed.

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Before that assertion is executed, you should reload the React Native
instance to make sure that no previous state is interfering with the
results.

Note: When you’re dealing with multiple elements (e.g.

in our case – a component renders multiple questions),
it is a good practice to assign a suffix testID with the
index of the element, to be able to query the specific
one. This, as well as some other interesting techniques,
is in the official Detox recommendation.
There are various matchers and expectations that can help you build
your test suite the way you want to.

Benefits: You have a better overview of the new features

and tweaks, can ship with confidence, and when the
tests are green - you save the time of other people (the
QA team).
A high-quality test suite that provides
enough coverage for your core features is
"By testing key features of an app
an investment in your team’s velocity. Af-
ter all, you can move only as fast as your via integration testing, develop-
confidence allows you to. And the tests are ers can effectively identify and
all about making sure you’re heading in the eliminate potential bugs,
right direction.
ultimately leading to a more
The React Native community is working
hard to make testing as easy and pleasant confident and efficient
as possible – for both your team and the development process."
QA teams. Thanks to that, you can spend
more time innovating and pleasing users
with flashy new functionalities, and not
Christoph Nakazawa
squashing bugs and regressions over and
Senior Engineering Manager & Creator of Jest
over again.

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PA RT 3 | C H A P T E R 2

Have a working
Continuous
Integration (CI)
in place
Have a working Continuous Integration (CI) in place The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Use a CI provider to improve the

building, testing, and distribution
of your apps.
Issue A lack of CI or having an unstable one means a lon-
ger feedback loop - you don’t know if your code works
and you cooperate slowly with other developers.
As you have already learned from the previous section, covering your
code with tests can be very helpful for increasing the overall reliability
of your app. However, while testing your product is vital, it is not the only
prerequisite on your way to shipping faster and with more confidence.

What is equally important is how quickly you detect the potential re-
gressions and whether finding them is a part of your daily development
lifecycle. In other words – it all comes down to the feedback loop.

For better context, let’s take a look at the early days of the development
process. When you’re starting out, your focus is on shipping the first
iteration (MVP) as fast as possible. Because of that, you may overlook
the importance of the architecture itself. When you’re done with the
changes, you submit them to the repository, letting other members of
your team know that the feature is ready to be reviewed.

‘main’

‘main’ ‘main’

An example of a workflow on Github, where changes are proposed in the form of a PR.

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While this technique can be very useful, it is potentially dangerous on

its own, especially as your team grows in size. Before you’re ready to
accept a PR, you should not only examine the code but also clone it to
your environment and test it thoroughly. At the very end of that process,
it may turn out that the proposed changes introduce a regression that
the original author hasn’t spotted.

The regression can occur because we all have different configurations,

environments, and ways of working.

It’s harder to onboard new members to your organiza-

tion. You can’t ship and test PRs and different contribu-
tions as they happen.
If you’re testing your changes manually, you’re not only increasing the
chances of shipping regressions to production. You’re also slowing
down the overall pace of the development. Thankfully, with the right
set of methodologies and a bit of automation, you can overcome this
challenge once and for all.

This is when Continuous Integration (CI) comes into play. CI is a de-

velopment practice where proposed changes are checked-in to the
upstream repository several times a day by the development team.
Next, they are verified by an automated build, allowing the team to de-
tect changes early.

The automated builds are performed by a dedicated cloud-based CI

provider that usually integrates from the place where you store your
code. Most of the cloud providers available these days support GitHub,
which is a Microsoft-owned platform for collaborating on projects that
use Git as their version control system.

CI systems pull the changes in real-time and perform a selected set of

tests to give you early feedback on your results. This approach intro-
duces a single source of truth for testing and allows developers with
different environments to receive convenient and reliable information.

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approach introduces a single source of truth for testing and allows

developers with different environments to receive convenient and re-
liable information.

Using a CI service, you not only test your code but also build a new ver-
sion of the documentation for your project, build your app, and distrib-
ute it among testers or releases. This technique is called Continuous
Deployment and focuses on the automation of releases. It has been
covered in more depth in this section.

Solution: Use a CI provider such as CircleCI to build your

application. Run all the required tests and make preview
releases if possible.
There are a lot of CI providers to choose from, with the most popular
being CircleCI, GitHub Actions and Bitrise. For the purposes of this
section, we have selected CircleCI.

It is the default CI provider for React Native and all projects created by
its community. In fact, there is actually an example project demonstrat-
ing the use of CI with React Native. You can learn more about it here.
We will employ it later in this section to present different CI concepts.

Note: A rule of the thumb is to take advantage of what

React Native or React Native Community projects al-
ready use. Going that route, you can ensure that it is
possible to make your chosen provider work with React
Native and that the most common challenges have been
already solved by the Core Team.

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As with most CI providers, it is extremely important to study their con-

figuration files before you do anything else.

Let’s take a look at a sample configuration file for CircleCI, taken from
the mentioned React Native example:

version: 2.1

jobs:
android:
working_directory: ~/CI-CD
docker:
- image: reactnativecommunity/react-native-android
steps:
- checkout
- attach_workspace:
at: ~/CI-CD
- run: npm i -g envinfo && envinfo
- run: npm install
- run: cd android && chmod +x gradlew && ./gradlew
assembleRelease

workflows:
build_and_test:
jobs:
- android

Example of .circleci/config.yml

The structure is a standard Yaml syntax for text-based configuration

files. You may want to learn about its basics before proceeding any
further.

Note: Many CI services, such as CircleCI or GitHub Ac-

tions, are based on Docker containers and the idea of
composing different jobs into workflows. You may find
many similarities between such services.
These are the three most important building blocks of a CircleCI con-
figuration: commands, jobs, and workflows.

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A command is nothing more than a shell script. It is executed within

the specified environment. Also, it is what performs the actual job in
the cloud. It can be anything, from a command to install your depen-
dencies, such as yarn install (if you’re using Yarn) to something
more complex like ./gradlew assembleDebug that builds Android files.

A job is a series of commands - described as steps - that is focused

on achieving a single, defined goal. Jobs can be run in different envi-
ronments, by choosing an appropriate Docker container.

For example, you may want to use a Node container if you need to run
only your React unit tests. As a result, the container will be smaller,
have fewer dependencies, and will install faster. If you want to build a
React Native application in the cloud, you may choose a different con-
tainer, e.g. with Android NDK/SDK or the one that uses OS X to build
Apple platforms.

Note: To help you choose the container to use when

running React Native tests, the team has prepared a
react-native-android Docker container that includes
both Node and Android dependencies needed to per-
form the Android build and tests.
In order to execute a job, it has to be assigned to a workflow. By de-
fault, jobs will be executed parallelly within a workflow, but this can be
changed by specifying the requirements for a job.

TS, Linter

You can also modify the jobs execution schedule by adding filters, so,
for instance, a deploy job will only run if the changes in the code refer
to the main branch.

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You can define many workflows for different purposes, e.g. one for
tests that would run once a PR is opened, and the other to deploy the
new version of the app. This is what React Native does to automatically
release its new versions every once in a while.

Benefits: You get early feedback on added features,

and swiftly spot the regressions. Also, you don’t waste
the time of other developers on testing the changes
that don’t work.
A properly configured and working CI provider can save you a lot of
time when shipping a new version of an application

GitHub UI reporting the status of CircleCI jobs, an example taken from React Native repository

By spotting errors beforehand, you can reduce the effort needed to review the
PRs and protect your product against regressions and bugs that may directly
decrease your income.

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Don’t be afraid to ship

fast with Continuous
Deployment
Don’t be afraid to ship fast with Continuous Deployment The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Establish a continuous deployment

setup to ship new features and verify
critical bugs faster.
Issue: Building and distributing your apps manually is a
complex and time-consuming process.
As you have learned in the previous section, automation of the critical
pieces of the development lifecycle can help you improve overall devel-
opment speed and security. The shorter the feedback loop, the faster
your team can iterate on the product itself.

However, testing and development are only a part of the activities that
you have to perform when working on a product. Another important
step is the deployment – building and distributing the application to
production. Most of the time, this process is manual.

The deployment takes time to set up and is far more complex than
just running tests in the cloud. For example, on iOS, Xcode configures
many settings and certificates automatically. This ensures a better de-
veloper experience for someone who’s working on a native application.
Developers who are used to such an approach often find it challenging
to move the deployment to the cloud and set up such things as certif-
icates manually.

The biggest downside of the manual approach is that it takes time and
doesn’t scale. In consequence, teams that don’t invest in the improve-
ments to this process end up releasing their software at a slower pace.

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Continuous Deployment is a strategy in which software is released fre-

quently through a set of automated scripts. It aims at building, testing,
and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach
helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing
for more incremental updates to applications in production.

You are not shipping new features and fixes as quickly

as you should.
Building and distributing your application manually slows down your
development process regardless of how big your team is. Even in small
product teams of around 5 people, automated build pipelines make
everyone’s work easier and reduce unnecessary communication. This
is especially important for remote companies.

Continuous Deployment also allows you to introduce standards and

best practices focused on improving the overall performance of the ap-
plication. Some of them have been previously discussed in this guide.
With all the steps required for the deployment in a single place, you
can ensure that all releases are done the same way and enroll compa-
ny-wide standards.

Solution: Establish a continuous deployment setup

(based on Fastlane) that makes the build and generates
the changelog. Ship to your users instantly.
When it comes to automating the deployment of mobile applications,
there are two ways to go.

The first way is to write a set of scripts from scratch by interacting with
xcode and gradle directly. Unfortunately, there are significant differ-
ences between the tooling of Android and iOS and not many developers
have enough experience to handle this automation. On top of that, iOS
is much more complicated than Android due to advanced code signing
and distribution policies. And as we have said before, if you are doing
it manually, even Xcode cannot help you.

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The second way is to use a pre-existing tool in which the developers

have handled the majority of use cases. Our favorite one is fastlane - a
set of modular utilities written in Ruby that let you build your iOS and An-
droid applications by writing a set of instructions in a configuration file.

After you have successfully built your binaries, it is time to deploy them
to their destination.

Again, you can either upload the files to the desired service (e.g. App
Store) manually or use a tool that will take care of that for you. For the
same reasons as before, we prefer to use an existing solution - in this
case, AppCenter by Microsoft.

AppCenter is a cloud service with tooling for the automation and de-
ployment of your application. Its biggest advantage is that many of
the settings can be configured from the graphical interface. It is much
easier to set up the App Store and Play Store deployments this way,
rather than working with uploads from the command line.

For the purpose of this section, we will use fastlane and AppCenter in
CircleCI pipelines to fully automate the process of app delivery to the
final users.

Note: Describing the ins and outs of the setup would

make this section too long. That’s why we have chosen
to refer only to the specific documentation. Our goal
is to provide you with an overview, and not a step-by-
step guide, since the final config will be different for
each project.

Setting up Fastlane
Before going into the details for Android and iOS, you have to make
sure that fastlane has been installed and configured on your devices.

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Next, you have to run the init command within the React Native project.
We will run the fastlane command twice from each native folder. This
is because React Native is actually two separate apps at a low level.

cd ./ios && fastlane init

cd ./android && fastlane init

As a result, this command will generate setup files in both ios and an-
droid folders. The main file in each folder would be called Fastfile and
it’s where all the lanes will be configured. In the fastlane nomenclature,
a lane is just like a workflow - a piece that groups low-level operations
that deploy your application.

Low-level operations can be performed by calling actions – predefined

fastlane operations that simplify your workflow. We will show you how
they function in the next section.

Setting up fastlane on Android

Now that you have successfully set up fastlane in your projects, you
are ready to automate the deployment of our Android application. To
do so, you can choose an Android specific action - in this case, gradle.
As the name suggests, Gradle is an action that allows you to achieve
similar results as with Android Gradle used standalone.

Our lane uses the gradle action to first clean the build folder, and then
assemble the APK with signature based on passed params.

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default_platform(:android)

project_dir = File.expand_path("..", Dir.pwd)

platform :android do
lane :build do |options|
if (ENV["ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD"] && ENV["ANDROID_KEY_
PASSWORD"])
properties = {
"RELEASE_STORE_PASSWORD" => ENV["ANDROID_KEYSTORE_
PASSWORD"]
"RELEASE_KEY_PASSWORD" => ENV["ANDROID_KEY_PASSWORD"]
}
end

gradle(
task: "clean",
project_dir: project_dir,
properties: properties,
print_command: false
)

gradle(
task: "assemble",
build_type: "Release",
project_dir: project_dir,
properties: properties,
print_command: false
)
end
end

Part of the android/fastlane/Fastfile that defines Android lane, named build

You should be able to run a lane build by implementing:

cd ./android && fastlane build

This should produce a signed Android APK.

Note: Don’t forget to set environment variables to access

keystore. These are RELEASE_STORE_PASSWORD and RE-
LEASE_KEY_PASSWORD and have been set in the example
presented above.

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Setting up fastlane on iOS

With the Android build being automated, you’re ready to move to iOS
now. As we discussed earlier, iOS is a bit more complex due to the
certification and provisioning profiles. They were designed by Apple
to increase security. Fortunately, fastlane ships with a few dedicated
actions that help us overcome these complexities.

You can start with the match action. It helps in managing and distrib-
uting iOS certificates and provisioning profiles among your team mem-
bers. You can read about the idea behind match in the codesigning.
guide concept.

Simply put, match takes care of setting up your device in a way that it
can successfully build an application that will be validated and accepted
by the Apple servers.

Note: Before you move any further, make sure that your
init match for your project. It will generate the required
certificates and store them in a central repository where
your team and other automation tools can fetch them.
Another action that you could use apart from match is gym. Gym is sim-
ilar to the Gradle action in a way that it actually performs the build of
your application. To do so, it uses the previously fetched certificates
and signs settings from match.

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default_platform(:ios)

ios_directory = File.expand_path("..", Dir.pwd)

base_path = File.expand_path("..", ios_directory)
ios_workspace_path = "#{ios_directory}/YOUR_WORKSPACE.
xcworkspace"
ios_output_dir = File.expand_path("./output", base_path)
ios_app_id = "com.example"
ios_app_scheme = "MyScheme"

before_all do
if is_ci? && FastlaneCore::Helper.mac?
setup_circle_ci
end
end

platform :ios do
lane :build do |options|
match(
type: options[:type],
readonly: true,
app_identifier: ios_app_id,
)

cocoapods(podfile: ios_directory)

gym(
configuration: "Release",
scheme: ios_app_scheme,
export_method: "ad-hoc",
workspace: ios_workspace_path,
output_directory: ios_output_dir,
clean: true,
xcargs: "-UseModernBuildSystem=NO"
)
end
end

Part of ios/fastlane/Fastfile where iOS lane is defined

You should be able to run lane build by running the same command
as for Android:

cd ./ios && fastlane build

This should produce an iOS application now too.

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Deploying the binaries

Now that you have automated the build, you are able to automate the
last part of the process - the deployment itself. To do so, you could use
App Center, as discussed earlier in this guide.

Note: You have to create an account in the App Center,

apps for Android and iOS in the dashboard and gen-
erate access tokens for each one of them. You will also
need a special Fastlane plugin that brings an appropri-
ate action to your toolbelt. To do so, run fastlane add_
plugin appcenter.
Once you are done with configuring your projects, you are ready to pro-
ceed with writing the lane that will package the produced binaries and
upload them to the App Center.

lane :deploy do
build

appcenter_upload(
api_token: ENV["APPCENTER_TOKEN"],
owner_name: "ORGANIZATION_OR_USER_NAME",
owner_type: "organization", # "user" | "organization"
app_name: "YOUR_APP_NAME",
file: "#{ios_output_dir}/YOUR_WORKSPACE.ipa",
notify_testers: true
)
end

Part of ios/fastlane/Fastfile with upload lane

That’s it! Now it is time to deploy the app by executing deploy lane from
your local machine.

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Integrating with CircleCI

Using all these commands, you are able to build and distribute the app
locally. Now, you can configure your CI server so it does the same on
every commit to main. To do so, you will use CircleCI – the provider we
have been using throughout this guide.

Note: Running Fastlane on CI server usually requires some

additional setup. Refer to official documentation to bet-
ter understand the difference between the settings in lo-
cal and CI environments.
To deploy an application from CircleCI, you can configure a dedi-
cated workflow that will focus on building and deploying the applica-
tion. It will contain a single job, called deploy_ios, that will execute our
fastlane command.

version: 2.1

jobs:
deploy_ios:
macos:
xcode: 14.2.0
working_directory: ~/CI-CD
steps:
- checkout
- attach_workspace:
at: ~/CI-CD
- run: npm install
- run: bundle install
- run: cd ios && bundle exec fastlane deploy

workflows:
deploy:
jobs:
- deploy_ios

Part of CircleCI configuration that executes Fastlane build lane

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Pipeline for Android will look quite similar. The main difference would
be the executor. Instead of a macOS one, a docker react-native-android
Docker image should be used.

Note: This is a sample usage within CircleCI. In your case,

it may make more sense to define filters and dependen-
cies on other jobs, to ensure the deploy_ios is run at the
right point in time.
You can modify or parametrize the presented lanes to use them for
other kinds of deploys, for instance, for the platform-specific App Store.
To learn the details of such advanced use cases, get familiar with the
official Fastlane documentation.

Benefits: A short feedback loop along with nightly or

weekly builds lets you verify features faster and ship
critical bugs more often.
With automated deployment, you no longer waste your time on man-
ual builds and sending the artifacts to test devices or app stores. Your
stakeholders are able to verify features faster and shorten the feedback
loop even further. With regular builds, you will be able to catch or ship
fixes to any critical bugs with ease.

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Ship OTA
(Over-The-Air) when
in an emergency
Ship OTA (Over-The-Air) when in an emergency The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Submit critical updates and fixes

instantly through OTA.
Issue: Traditional ways of updating apps are too slow
and you lose your precious time on them.
The traditional model of sending updates on mobile is fundamentally
different from the one we know from writing JavaScript applications
for other platforms. Unlike the web, mobile deployment is much more
complex and comes with better security out-of-the-box. We have talked
about that in detail in the previous section focused on the CI/CD.

What does it mean for your business?

Every update, no matter how quickly shipped by your developers, is
usually going to wait some time while the App Store and Play Store
teams review your product against their policies and best practices.

This process is particularly challenging in all Apple platforms, where

apps are often taken down or rejected, because of not following cer-
tain policies or meeting the required standard for the user interface.
Thankfully, the risk of your app being rejected with React Native is re-
duced to a minimum, as you’re working on the JavaScript part of the
application. The React Native Core Team ensures that all the changes
done to the framework have no impact on the success of your appli-
cation’s submission.

As a result, the submission process takes a while. And if you’re about

to ship a critical update, every minute counts.

Fortunately, with React Native, it is possible to dynamically ship your

JavaScript changes directly to your users, skipping the App Store review
process. This technique is often referred to as an over-the-air update.
It lets you change the appearance of your application immediately, for
all the users, following the technique that you have selected.

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When critical bugs happen - minutes and hours can be

critical. Don’t wait for Apple and Google to review your
app.
If your application is not OTA-ready, you risk it being left with a critical
bug on many devices, for as long as Apple/Google reviews your product
and allows it to be distributed.

Even though the review times have gotten much better over the years,
it is still a good escape hatch to be able to immediately recover from
an error that slipped through the testing pipeline and into production.

Solution: Implement OTA updates with App Center/

CodePush or EAS Build
As mentioned earlier, React Native is OTA-ready. It means that its
architecture and design choices make such updates possible. However,
it doesn’t ship with the infrastructure to perform such operations. To
do so, you will need to integrate a 3rd-party service that carries its own
infrastructure for doing so.

There are two popular ways to implement OTA into your app. The first
and most popular tool for OTA updates is CodePush, a service that is
a part of Microsoft’s App Center suite. The second tool is created by
the Expo team and it’s called EAS Update.

App Center/CodePush
Configuring the native side
To integrate CodePush into your application, please follow the required
steps for iOS and Android, respectively. We decided to link to the official
guides instead of including the steps here as they include additional na-
tive code to apply and that is very likely to change in the coming months.

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Configuring the JavaScript side

Once you set up the service on the native side, you can use the JavaS-
cript API to enable the updates and define when they should happen.
One of the ways that enable fetching updates on the app startup is to
use the codePush wrapper and wrap your main component.

import React from 'react';

import { View } from 'react-native';
import codePush from 'react-native-code-push';

const MyApp = () => <View />;

export default codePush(MyApp);

Basic CodePush integration

That’s it! If you have performed all the changes on the native side, your
application is now OTA-ready.

For more advanced use cases, you can also change the default settings
on when to check for updates and when to download and apply them.
For example, you can force CodePush to check for updates every time
the app is brought back to the foreground and install updates on the
next resume.

The following diagram code snippet demonstrates such a solution:

import React from 'react';

import { View } from 'react-native';
import codePush from 'react-native-code-push';

const MyApp = () => <View />;

export default codePush({

updateDialog: true,
checkFrequency: codePush.CheckFrequency.ON_APP_RESUME,
installMode: codePush.InstallMode.ON_NEXT_RESUME,
})(MyApp);

Custom CodePush setup

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Shipping updates to the application

After configuring CodePush on both JavaScript and the native side of
React Native, it is time to launch the update and let your new custom-
ers enjoy it. To do so, we can do this from the command line, by using
the App Center CLI:

npm install -g appcenter-cli

appcenter login

And then, a release command to bundle React Native assets and files and
send them to the cloud:

appcenter codepush release-react -a <ownerName>/<appName>

Once these steps are complete, all users running your app will receive
the update using the experience you configured in the previous section.

Note: Before publishing a new CodePush release, you

will have to create an application in the App Center
dashboard.
That will give you the ownerName and appName that you’re looking for.
As said before, you can either do this via UI by visiting App Center, or
by using the App Center CLI.

EAS Update
EAS stands for Expo App Services. One of its tools is EAS Update. It’s
a nice alternative to CodePush, especially if you’re already running an
Expo app. As with other Expo products, it provides superior DX and is
usually a pleasure to work with.

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Installing EAS CLI

First, what you need to do is to install the eas-cli package by passing
the command:

npm install -g eas-cli

or you can use just npx eas-cli to run the commands.

Info: To get EAS Update working in your project with the bare React
Native workflow, you need to set up Expo in your project. See the guide
to make that work correctly.

Setting up the build tool and EAS Update

Info: To build your app you can use either EAS Build or another tool. If
you don’t want to use EAS Build, here’s the guide on what to do.

Then you need to initialize your project with EAS Build:

eas update:configure

And after this command, you need to set up the configuration file for
builds:

eas build:configure

After running these commands, the eas.json file will be created in the
root directory of your project. It contains the whole config for EAS to
run properly.

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{
cli: {
version: '>= 2.8.0',
},
build: {
development: {
distribution: 'internal',
android: {
gradleCommand: ':app:assembleDebug',
},
ios: {
buildConfiguration: 'Debug',
},
},
preview: {
distribution: 'internal',
},
production: {},
},
submit: {
production: {},
},
}

Info: If you’re using the bare React Native workflow, you will need to
make some additional configuration. Read the guide to see how to do it.

Creating the build

Then you need to create the build, you can do it with the eas build
command:

eas build -p android --profile production

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Creating update
Once you have installed this build on your device, we’re ready to send
the update to the devices! So make some changes to the JS part of the
app to see if it actually works after we install the update on the phone,
then you’re ready to run the command which created the update, and
upload it to EAS.

eas update --branch production --message "Fixed a bug."

Once these steps are complete, all users running your app will receive
the update with your changes!

You can configure EAS Update in many different ways - you can play
with different branches, different setups, and even a custom host up-
date service.

EAS Update is very handy when you need to deploy your changes to
the production, but it’s also very handy in the development process.
It’s convenient to allow other developers to preview the update for re-
viewing purposes.

Benefits: Ship critical fixes and some content instantly to

the users.
With OTA updates integrated into your application, you can send your Ja-
vaScript updates to all your users in a matter of minutes. This possibility
may be crucial for fixing significant bugs or sending instant patches.

For example, it may happen that your backend will stop working and
it causes a crash at startup. It may be a mishandled error - you never
had a backend failure during the development and forgot to handle
such edge cases.

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You can fix the problem by displaying a fallback message and informing
users about the problem. While the development will take you around
one hour, the actual update and review process can take hours if not
days.

With OTA updates set up, you can react to this in minutes without
risking the bad UX that will affect the majority of users.

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Make your app

consistently fast
Make your app consistently fast The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Use the DMAIC process to help you

prevent regressing on app
performance
Issue: Every once in a while after fixing a performance
issue, the app gets slow again.
Customers have very little patience for slow apps. There is so much
competition on the market that customers can quickly switch to another
app. According to the Unbounce report, nearly 70% of consumers admit
that page speed influences their willingness to buy. Good examples
here are Walmart and Amazon—both of these companies noticed an
increase in revenue by up to 1% for every 100 milliseconds of load time
improvement. The performance of websites and mobile apps can thus
noticeably impact businesses' performance.

It’s becoming increasingly important to not only fix performance issues

but also make sure they don’t happen again. You want your React Na-
tive app to perform well and fast at all times.

Solution: Use the DMAIC methodology to help you

solve performance issues consistently.
From the technical perspective, we should begin by avoiding any guess-
work and base all decisions on data. Poor assumptions lead to false
results. We should also remember that improving performance is a
process, so it’s impossible to fix everything at once. Small steps can
provide big results.

This all leads us to the fact that developing an app is a process. There
are some interactions that lead to results. And, what is most important,
the processes can be optimized.

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One of the most effective ways of doing that is using the DMAIC meth-
odology. It’s very data-driven and well-structured and can be used to
improve React Native apps. The acronym stands for Define, Measure,
Analyze, Improve, and Control. Let’s see how we can apply each phase
in our apps.

Define
In this phase, we should focus on defining the problem, what we want
to achieve, opportunities for improvement, etc. It’s important to listen
to the customer’s voice in this phase - their expectations and feedback.
It helps to better understand the needs and preferences and what prob-
lems they are facing. Next, it is very important to measure it somehow.
Let’s say the customer wants a fast checkout. After analyzing the
components, we know that to achieve this we need a swift checkout
process, a short wait time, and smooth animations and transitions. All
of these points can be decomposed into CTQ (Critical-to-Quality) that
are measurable and can be tracked. For example, a short wait time
can be decomposed into a quick server response and a low number
of server errors.

Another handy tool is analyzing common user paths. With good track-
ing, we can analyze and understand what parts of the app are mostly
used by the users.

In this phase, it’s very important to choose priorities. It should end up

with defining the order in which we will optimize things. Any tools and
techniques for prioritizing will definitely help here.

Ultimately, we need to define where we want to go - we should define

our goals and what exactly we want to achieve. Keep in mind that it
all should be measurable! It's a good practice to put these goals in the
project scope.

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Measure
Since we already know where we want to go, it’s time to assess the
starting point. It’s all about collecting as much data as possible to get
the actual picture of the problem. We need to ensure the measurement
process is precise. It’s really helpful to create a data collection plan and
engage the development team to build the metrics. After that, it’s time
to do some profiling.

When profiling in React Native, the main question is whether to do this

on JavaScript or the native side. It heavily depends on the architecture
of the app, but most of the time it’s a mix of both.

One of the most popular tools is React Profiler, which allows us to wrap
a component to measure the render time and the number of renders.
It’s very helpful because many performance issues come from unnec-
essary rerenders. Discover how to use it here:

import React, { Profiler } from 'react';

import { View } from 'react-native';

const Component = () => (

<Profiler id="Component" onRender={(...args) => console.
log(args)}>
<View />
</Profiler>
);

export default Component;

Using React Profiler API

It will output the data:

{
id: "Component",
phase: "mount",
actualDuration: 1.3352311453,
baseDuration: 0.95232323318,
...
}

Output of the React Profiler API

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The second tool is a library created by Shopify - react-native-perfor-

mance. It allows you to place some markers in the code and measure
the execution time. There is also a pretty nice Flipper plugin that helps
to visualize the output:

https://shopify.github.io/react-native-performance/docs/guides/flipper-react-native-performance

Speaking of Flipper, it has some more plugins that help us to measure

the app performance and speed up the development process. We can
use, e.g. React Native Performance Monitor Plugin for a Lighthouse-like
experience or React Native Performance Lists Profiler Plugin.

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On the native side, the most common method is using Native IDEs -
Xcode and Android Studio. There are plenty of useful insights which
can be analyzed and lead to some conclusions and results.

The most important aspect of this phase is measurement variation. Due

to different environments, we have to be very careful when profiling.
Even if the app is run on the same device, there might be some external
factors that affect performance measurements. That’s why we should
base all the measurements on release builds.

Analyze
The goal of this phase is to find the root cause of our problem. It’s a
good idea to start with a list of things that could potentially cause the
problem. A little brainstorming with a team is really helpful here.

One of the most popular tools to define a problem is called a cause

and effect diagram. It looks like a fish and we should draw it from
right to left. We start from the head and it should contain the prob-
lem statement - at this stage, we should already have it based on the
Define phase. Then, we identify all the potential major causes of the
problem and assign them to the fish bones. After that, we assign all
the potential causes to each major cause. There are many things that
could have an impact on performance. The list could get really long,
so it’s important to narrow it down. Outline the most important factors
and focus on them.

Finally, it’s time to test the hypothesis. For example, if the main problem
is low FPS, and the potential major cause is related to list rendering,
we can think of some improvements in the area of images in the list
items. We need to design a test that will help us accept or reject the
hypothesis - it will probably be some kind of proof of concept. Next,
we interpret the results and decide if it was improved or not. Then we
make a final decision.

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Cause and effect diagram example

Improve
Now we know what our goal is and how we want to achieve it, it’s time
to make some improvements. This is the phase where optimization
techniques start to make sense.

Before starting, it’s a good idea to have the next brainstorming session
and identify potential solutions. Depending on the root cause, there
might be a lot of them. Based on the last example with images on the
list item, we can think about implementing proper image caching and
reducing unnecessary renders.

After outlining the solutions, it’s time to pick the best one. Sometimes
the solution that gives the best effects might be extremely costly, e.g.
when it’s necessary to make some architectural changes.

It’s then time to implement the solution. After that, it’s required to prop-
erly test it and we are done!

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Control
The last step is the control phase. We need to make sure that every-
thing works well now. The performance will degrade if it is not under
control. People tend to blame devices, the used technology, or even
users when it comes to bad performance. So what do we need to do
to keep our performance on a high level?

We need to make sure that we have a control plan. We can use some
of our work from the previous phases to make it. We should point out
focal points, some measurement characteristics, acceptable ranges
for indicators, and testing frequency. Additionally, it is a good practice
to write down some procedures and what to do if we spot issues.

The most important aspect of the control phase is monitoring regres-

sions. Until recently it was quite difficult to do that in React Native, but
now we have plenty of options to improve our monitoring.

Real-time user monitoring

One way to keep the performance improvements we intro-
duce in our apps is through real-time monitoring tools. Such as
Firebase Performance Monitoring, which is a service that gives
us some insights into performance issues in production. Or
Sentry Performance Monitoring, which tracks application performance,
collects metrics like throughput and latency, and displays the impact
of errors across multiple services.

It's a great addition to any app builders that want to have insights on
how the performance is distributed across all the devices that install
their apps. Based on real user data.

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Testing regressions as a part of the development

process
Another way to keep performance regressions under control is through
automated testing. Profiling, measuring, and running on various devices
is quite manual and time-consuming. That’s why developers avoid doing
it. However, it gets too easy to unintentionally introduce performance
regressions that would only get caught during QA, or worse, by your
users. Thankfully, we have a way to write automated performance re-
gression tests in JavaScript for React and React Native.

Reassure allows you to automate React Native app performance re-

gression testing on CI or a local machine. In the same way you write
your integration and unit tests that automatically verify that your app
is still working correctly, you can write performance tests that verify
that your app is still working performantly. You can think about it as
a React performance testing library. In fact, Reassure is designed to
reuse as much of your React Native Testing Library tests and setup as
possible. As it’s designed by its maintainers and creators.

It works by measuring certain characteristics—render duration and ren-

der count—of the testing scenario you provide and comparing that to
the stable version measured beforehand. It repeats the scenario mul-
tiple times to reduce the impact of random variations in render times
caused by the runtime environment. Then it applies a statistical analy-
sis to figure out whether the code changes are statistically significant
or not. As a result, it generates a human-readable report summarizing
the results and displays it on CI or as a comment to your pull request.

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The simplest test you can write would look something like this:

import React from 'react';

import { View } from 'react-native';
import { measurePerformance } from 'reassure';

const Component = () => {

return <View />;
};

test('mounts Component', async () => {

await measurePerformance(<Component />);
});

Code: Component.perf-test.tsx

This test will measure the render times of Component during mount-
ing and the resulting sync effects. Let’s take a look at a more complex
example though. Here we have a component that has a counter and a
slow list component:

import React from 'react';

import { Pressable, Text, View } from 'react-native';
import { SlowList } from './SlowList';

const AsyncComponent = () => {

const [count, setCount] = React.useState(0);

const handlePress = () => {

setTimeout(() => setCount((c) => c + 1), 10);
};

return (
<View>
<Pressable accessibilityRole="button"
onPress={handlePress}>
<Text>Action</Text>
</Pressable>

<Text>Count: {count}</Text>

<SlowList count={200} />

</View>
);
};

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And the performance test looks as follows:

import React from 'react';

import { screen, fireEvent } from '@testing-library/react-
native';
import { measurePerformance } from 'reassure';
import { AsyncComponent } from '../AsyncComponent';

test('AsyncComponent', async () => {

const scenario = async () => {
const button = screen.getByText('Action');

fireEvent.press(button);
await screen.findByText('Count: 1');

fireEvent.press(button);
await screen.findByText('Count: 2');

fireEvent.press(button);
fireEvent.press(button);
fireEvent.press(button);
await screen.findByText('Count: 5');
};

await measurePerformance(<AsyncComponent />, { scenario });

});

When run through its CLI, Reassure will generate a performance com-
parison report. It’s important to note that to get a diff of measurements,
we need to run it twice. The first time with a --baseline flag, which
collects the measurements under the .reassure/ directory.

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After running this command, we can start optimizing our code and see
how it affects the performance of our component. Normally, we would
keep the baseline measurement and wait for performance regressions
to be caught and reported by Reassure. In this case, we’ll skip that
step and jump straight into optimizing, because we just noticed a nice
possibility to do so. And since we have our baseline measurement for
reference, we can actually verify our assumptions and whether the im-
provement was real or only subjective.

The possibility we noticed is that the <SlowList/> component can

be memoized, as it doesn’t depend on any external variables. We can
leverage useMemo for that case:

const slowList = useMemo(() => <SlowList count={200} />, []);

Once we’re done, we can run Reassure a second time. Now without the
--baseline flag.

Performance comparison report from Reassure

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Now that Reassure has two test runs to compare—the current and the
baseline—it can prepare a performance comparison report. As you can
notice, thanks to applying memoization to the SlowList component
rendered by AsyncComponent, the render duration went from 78.4 ms
to 26.3 ms, which is roughly a 66% performance improvement.

Test results are assigned to certain categories:

• Significant Changes To Render Duration shows a test scenario
where the change is statistically significant and should be looked
into as it marks a potential performance loss/improvement.
• Meaningless Changes To Render Duration shows test scenarios
where the change is not statistically significant.
• Changes To Render Count shows test scenarios where the render
count did change.
• Added Scenarios shows test scenarios that do not exist in the
baseline measurements.
• Removed Scenarios shows test scenarios that do not exist in the
current measurements.

When connected with Danger JS, Reassure can output this report in the
form of a GitHub comment, which helps catch the regressions during
code review.

Report generated by Reassure with Danger JS

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You can discover more use cases and examples in the docs.

Benefits: A well-structured and organized optimization

process.
When working on an app, regardless of its size, it’s important to have
a clear path for reaching our goals. The main benefit of using DMAIC
when optimizing React Native applications is a structured and direct
approach. Without it, it may be difficult to verify what works (and why).
Sometimes our experience and intuition are just enough. But that’s not
always the case.

Having a process like this allows us to focus on problem-solving and

constantly increase productivity. Thanks to the DMAIC approach, per-
formance optimization becomes a part of your normal development
workflow. Making your app closer to
being performant by default. Spotting
the performance issues even before
they hit your users. "Performance regression monitoring is a
critical process in the development and
No software is flawless. Bugs and maintenance of mobile apps. Without it,
performance issues will happen even small issues can go unnoticed and lead
if you’re the most experienced devel- to significant performance degradation,
oper on the team. But we can take ac- negatively impacting the user experience
tion to mitigate those risks by using
and potentially decreasing user retention.
automated tools like Sentry, Firebase,
Regular performance regression moni-
or Reassure. Use them in your project
and enjoy the additional confidence
toring allows developers to proactively
they bring to your projects. And the identify and fix issues before they be-
improved UX they bring to your users come a problem for users, ensuring the
in turn. app runs at optimal performance and pro-
viding a better experience for all users."

Michał Chudziak
Independent Consultant @michalchudziak.dev

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PA RT 3 | C H A P T E R 6

Know how to
profile iOS
Know how to
profile iOS The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Improve your app with real-time

metrics
Issue: It takes too much time to see the result of an ac-
tion.
Profiling is essential to understanding the runtime performance of the
app, through analysis that measures the memory or time complexity,
frequency, and duration of function calls, etc. Getting all this informa-
tion helps you to track down and provide proper solutions to keep your
app healthy and your users engaged.

Xcode provides some basic tools to do the first report. You can monitor
the CPU, Memory, and Network.

CPU Monitor measures the amount of work done. Memory Monitor is

for observing the use of the app. All iOS devices use SSD for permanent
storage, accessing this data is slower compared to RAM. Disk Moni-
tor is for understanding your app’s disk-writing performance. Network
Monitor analyzes your iOS app’s TCP/IP and UDP/IP connections.

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You can tap on each of them to find more information.

It also provides an extra monitor that isn’t shown by default but can
help you inspect your UI - it's the View Hierarchy.
When the app is running and you are on the screen you want to inspect,
click on Debug View Hierarchy.

This will show your current UI in a 2D/3D model and the view tree.

This will help you to detect overlappings (you can’t see a component)
or if you want to flatten your component tree. Even though RN does a
view flattening it sometimes can’t do it with all of them, so here we can
do some optimization focusing on specific items.

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Let’s say we have a TODO list app, and when the Add button is pressed,
it adds the new item to the list. However, it takes a couple of seconds
to show up on the list because there is some logic before the item is
added. Let’s go to our dev toolbox and pick up our first instrument so
we can confirm and measure the delay.

iOS Instruments
Instruments is a debugging and profiling tool that comes prepackaged
with xCode, and is literally a box of tools, each of them serving a differ-
ent purpose. You choose from a list of templates, and you choose any
of them depending on your goal: improving performance or battery life
or fixing a memory problem.
We are going to use Time Profiler. Let’s dive into it. With xCode open,
we go to Open Developer Tool -> Instruments. Then, scroll down to find
the Time Profiler tool.

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It will open a new window. To start profiling your app, click on the drop-
down menu and select your device and the app.

When the app opens, start using it normally, or in this case, add a new
TODO item.

After playing around and adding the new TODO item, we can see there
is a big blue rectangle, which means there is something that is taking
a lot of time to finish. Let’s take a look at the threads.

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You can expand by pressing option+click over the chevron, which will
expand to display useful information. At least for now it is showing the
memory address, but we will need to find another way to find where
the problem is.

Solution: Combining with a tool specific for JS Context

tracking.
Let’s use Flipper, the same one that we used in Pay Attention to UI
re-renders, but we are going to use another monitor called Hermes
Debugger (RN). With the app open and running, we go to Flipper, select
the running app if not selected already, and go to Hermes Debugger
(RN) -> Profiler

We click Start so the profiler begins. We do the same flow and actions
as before when profiling with Time Profiler. When we Stop, we will see
all the data collected.

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By default the data will be sorted bottom-up with the heavy tasks at
the top. We can see that a function called doFib is taking ~14 sec to
complete, it is a good start, let’s go into that function and see what we
can do. The fixes will vary depending on your code.

After applying a possible fix, we first check Time Profiler again. We

click on the record button and start using the app, in our case let's add
a new TODO item.

As we can see, the fix we applied did work, we aren’t seeing the big
blue rectangle like before. This is a good sign. Let’s continue with our
profiling path to check how it looks in Flipper.
Start profiling the app one more time using Hermes Debugger (RN) ->
Profiler.

We don’t see the doFib function anymore, only other expected RN tasks.

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Benefits: Having a faster and more responsive app.

70% of the users will leave the app if the response to a given action
takes too long. Profiling our apps has become one of the main steps
in our development life cycle. Using specific tools like Time Profiler will
help us understand if our app is responding fast or where we could find
areas of improvement. Remember, users are becoming more sensitive
to speed and delays, even a 0.1 sec of improvement can increase a
conversion rate by 10.1%.

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PA RT 3 | C H A P T E R 7

Know how to
profile Android
Know how to profile Android The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Get real-time metrics to better your

app understanding
Issue: You encounter a performance issue that comes
directly from Android runtime.
In the event of any performance issues, we mostly use React Profiler
to troubleshoot and resolve our problems. Since most of the perfor-
mance problems originate from the JS realm, we don’t usually need
to do anything beyond that. But sometimes we’ll encounter a bug or
performance issue that comes directly from the Android runtime. In
such a case, we’ll need a fine tool to help us gather the following met-
rics from the device:
• CPU
• memory
• network
• battery usage
Based on that data, we can check whether our app consumes more
energy than usual or in some cases, uses more CPU power than it
should. It is useful especially to check the executed code on lower-end
(LE) Android devices. Some algorithms can run faster on some devices
and the end user will not spot any glitches, but we have to remember,
some customers can use LE devices and the algorithm or function can
be too heavy for their phones. High-end devices will handle it because
their hardware is powerful.

Solution: Profile your app with Android Profiler in An-

droid Studio
Android Profiler in Android Studio
Android Studio is the IDE developed by JetBrains. It is officially sup-
ported by Google and the official IDE, which can be used to develop any
Android app. It is very powerful and contains lots of functionalities in
one place. One of those tools is Android Profiler.

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If you have not installed Android Studio yet, you can install it using this
link.

To open the Profiler, choose View > Tool Windows > Profiler from the
Android Studio menu bar:

Or click Profile in the toolbar.

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Before you start profiling the app, please remember:

• Run the app on a real Android device that is affected, preferably a

lower-end phone or emulator if you don’t have one. If your app has
runtime monitoring set up, use a model that is either the most used
by users or the one that’s affected by a particular issue.
• Turn off development mode. You must be sure that the app uses a
JS bundle instead of the metro server, which provides that bundle.
To turn it off, please share your device, click on Settings and find
JS Dev Mode:

After that, go to the Profiler tab and add a new profiler session:

Wait for the session to attach to your app and start performing actions
that could cause some performance issues, like swiping, scrolling, nav-
igating, etc. Once you’re done, you should see some metrics like these:

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Each greenfield React Native app has only one Android Activity. If your
app has more than one, it’s most likely a brownfield one. Read more
about the brownfield approach here. In the above example, we don’t
see anything interesting. Everything works fine without any glitches.
Let’s check each metric:
• The CPU metric is strictly correlated to energy consumption because
the CPU needs more energy to do some computations.
• The memory metric is not changing while using the app, which is
expected. Memory usage can grow, e.g. when opening new screens,
and drop when the garbage collector (GC) releases free memory,
e.g. when navigating out of a screen. When memory increases un-
expectedly and keeps on growing, it may indicate a memory leak,
which we want to avoid, as it can crash the app with out of memory
(OOM) errors.
• The network section has been moved to a separate tool called the
Network Tab. In most cases, this metric is not needed, because it
is mostly related to the backend infrastructure. If you would like to
profile a network connection, you can find more information here.
• The energy section gives hints on when our app’s energy usage
is low, medium, or high, impacting the daily experience of using
the app.

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Use Android Profiler in action

In the previous example, we could see some relations between each
metric:

To see a more detailed view, we have to double-click on the tab. Now we

can see more details. When the user started to do some touch action
(swiping in the above example), we could see more CPU work. Each
app will have its own signature of CPU spikes and lows. It’s important
to build an intuition about it, by interacting with it and pairing certain
activities, like touch events, with the increased usage. In other words,
some spikes are expected, because the work needs to be done. The
problem starts when CPU usage is very high for extended periods of
time or in unexpected places.

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Let’s imagine you would like to pick the best list or scroll view compo-
nent for your React Native app, which has the best performance on a
lower-end device. You noticed the current solutions could be revamped
or improved and you started working on this. In your experiment, you
would like to check how your solution works for LE devices using the
above-described solution. When you double-clicked on CPU, you could
spot the below data:

Here you can see the mqt_js thread is used almost all the time and does
some heavy computation because your computations are done on the JS
side. You can start thinking about how to improve it. There are multiple
options to check:
• Replace the bridge with JSI in terms of communication – do tests if
JSI is faster than the bridge.
• Move some part of the code to the native side – on the native side
you have more control over threads execution and can schedule some
work to not block the JS or UI thread.
• Use a different native component – replace the native scroll view with
your custom solution.
• Use shadow nodes – do some expensive calculation with C++ and
pass it to the native side.

You can try out all of those solutions and compare the effect between
each other. The profiler will provide you with a metric and based on that
you can make a decision about which approach fits best to your partic-
ular problem.

There’s more info about the Android Profiler here.

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System Tracing
Using the Android Studio CPU Profiler, we can also make a system
tracing. We can check when the appropriate function has been called.
We can triage all threads and see which function is the costliest which
affects the UX. To enable system tracing, click on the CPU section and
select System Trace Recording

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After some interaction, you should be able to see all the threads with
details:

You can also save your data by clicking the Save Button:

And use the data in a different tool, e.g. Perfetto:

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You’ll also want to check the official Android Profiling guide by the Re-
act Native core team. They use different tools, but the outcome will be
the same. The guide provides case studies and how to spot an issue
on different threads:
• UI thread
• JS thread
• Native module thread
• Render Thread (only Android)

You can find more about threading models in the New Architecture
chapter.

Flipper performance plugin for Android

We already know Flipper can be quite handy in hunting performance
issues. One of the most interesting plugins to help us out on Android
is android-performance-profiler. It can be used as a standalone tool or
on a CI. It can generate beautiful reports, so this tool can be used to
make some sophisticated experiments.

Here is a picture of an example experiment:

Comparison of the new vs old architecture of React Native by Almouro. Source.

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You can also automate your experiments with e2e tests and generate
reports locally or on a CI. Those reports can be used to compare solu-
tions with each other.

Benefits: Real-time metrics will improve your app

understanding
As stated above, users will abandon your app if the response time is
too long. Using specific tools will help you understand the root cause
of the app’s performance issue.

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Thank you
We hope that you found the aforementioned best practices for React
Native optimization useful and that they will make your work easier.
We did our best to make this guide comprehensive and describe both
the technical and business aspects of the optimization process.

If you enjoyed it, don’t hesitate to share it with your friends who also
use React Native in their projects.

If you have more questions or need

help with cross-platform or React
Native development, we will be
happy to provide a free consultation.
Just contact us!
Thank you The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

Authors
Michał Pierzchała
As Head of Technology at Callstack, he is passionate about building
mobile and web experiences, high-quality JS tooling, and Open Source.
Core Jest and React Native community contributor. Space exploration
enthusiast.
twitter.com/thymikee
github.com/thymikee

Jakub Bujko
With multiple years of delving deep into react.js development in his
pocket, Kuba went on to master mobile development. Passionate about
edge technologies, clean and minimalistic code, and charting the paths
for the future of React and React Native development.
twitter.com/f3ng__liu
github.com/Xiltyn

Maciej Jastrzębski
React & React Native developer with multiple years of experience build-
ing native iOS and Android apps. Passionate about building robust and
delightful apps along with writing well-architected and readable code.
Loves learning new things. He likes to travel in his free time, hike in the
mountains, and take photographs.
twitter.com/mdj_dev
github.com/mdjastrzebski

Piotr Trocki
Software developer who started his journey from mobile apps. Now
Piotr is focused on mastering both Native (Android, iOS) and React
Native technologies in brownfield applications. When not coding, he

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Thank you The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

spends his free time on the dance floor.

twitter.com/Tr0zZe
github.com/troZee

Jakub Binda
A dedicated software developer who pays a lot of attention to the de-
tails in every task he does. Always committed and eager to learn, Kuba
likes to create things and dive into how they work. A father of two and
a husband to the woman of his life. Those two roles motivate him the
most and give him the strength to move mountains.
twitter.com/jbinda
github.com/jbinda

Szymon Rybczak
Szymon is a 16-year-old React Native Developer with two years of ex-
perience and currently doing mobile app development at Callstack. In
his free time, he likes to discover new and interesting technologies.
github.com/szymonrybczak
twitter.com/SzymonRybczak

Hur Ali
TypeScript enthusiast mastering the React-Native and Native realm.
He feels best in diving deep with mobile tech, making proof-of-concept
projects, and experimenting with new technologies. In his free time, he
enjoys playing FIFA and contribution to OSS.
twitter.com/hurali97
github.com/hurali97

Oskar Kwaśniewski
React Native Developer at Callstack. Currently, he’s strengthening his
knowledge of native development and making some OSS contributions.

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Thank you The Ultimate Guide to React Native Optimization

During his free time, he enjoys riding a bike, going to the gym, and play-
ing video games.
github.com/okwasniewski
twitter.com/o_kwasniewski

Tomasz Misiukiewicz
React Native Developer at Callstack with a strong background in web
development. Big fan of keeping the code clean and simple. Loves to
learn new stuff and enhance his programming skillset every day.
github.com/TMisiukiewicz
twitter.com/TMisiukiewicz

Eduardo Graciano
Senior mobile developer at Callstack. Hacking almost all kinds of mobile
tech and always looking forward to making readable and maintainable
code without messing up everything.
github.com/gedu
twitter.com/teddydroid07

Andrew Andilevko
React Native developer with a background in Android development. He
likes complex tasks to constantly expand his expertise and knowledge.
He spends his free time with his wife and pug.
github.com/andrewworld

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About Callstack
We are a team of React and React Native experts and consultants
focused on delivering cutting-edge technology. We love to share our
knowledge and expertise with others.

That’s why we contribute to the React Native community by creating

and maintaining many open-source libraries and organizing the biggest
conference focused on React Native - the React Native EU conference.
We’re official Meta and Vercel partners.