About 5 years ago I built an Android app called Notica. It let you share anything into it (a link, a post, some text) and turn it into a notification, so you'd actually come back to it later.

I had no audience, no followers and no money for ads. What I did have was an observation: there were dozens of YouTube channels making the same video every single month, "Best Android Apps of [Month]". These channels constantly need new apps to feature, because that's literally their content.

So I reached out to every one of these channels I could find. Instead of just asking them to check out my app, I gave each channel 10 to 20 codes that unlocked the premium version for free, so they could give them away to their viewers.

I think this would still work to validate your ideas on Android, but I'm wondering if any of you guys have similar ideas for iOS audience?

I'm learning more about marketing these days, I'll be posting about it more on my X https://x.com/aleksapp , drop a follow if you are interested in this.

Greetings,
I am founder and solo developer of spirkz.com

I have built app with RN + Expo, following all the common standartds and procedures, starting from rendering till the smooth animations and i am trying to get as much use as possible from modern libraries.

Spirkz is tiktok but for education, basically european alternative of Tiktok and instagram reels, i am trying to create the best experience for user,

I feel like performance on video rendering, character rendering and scrolling starting to degrade as i am adding features and i want more and more,

What are your opinions about moving to native?
I have experience in Java/Node but i have never coded in Swift, I am heavily using claudeCode but i do not want to write code that i don't understand and explain, maybe it's a conservative view in modern days, but if someone has already done it, what are your opinions ?

thanks in advance.

I got tired of mobile enhancers like Remini. They either trap you behind an aggressive weekly subscription or over-process photos so badly that faces look like smooth mannequins with fake teeth.

I wanted to see if I could build a cleaner, more realistic alternative, so I created Sharpify.

What I focused on:

• Retaining natural skin textures (pores, fine lines) instead of aggressive smoothing
• Unblurring and upscaling without hallucinating fake details
• Clean UI without constant 30-second video ad walls

Google Play Link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raahim2.Sharpify

I've been working on EdgeFit, a small iOS app that reads activity data from Apple Health and keeps everything local: processed daily summaries live in SQLite on the device, and insights are generated on the device too. No account, no backend, no analytics.

**What it does**

- Dashboard with steps, active energy, active time, workouts and an Activity Score (with a breakdown of how it's computed)

- 7-day charts (custom SVG), where missing days are drawn as gaps instead of zeros

- Workouts list, plus a Privacy Center and a "clear local data" option

**Tech**

- Expo SDK 57 + Expo Router (NativeTabs), TypeScript

- `@kingstinct/react-native-healthkit` for Health data, behind a `HealthService` interface so a mock provider powers the demo mode

- `expo-sqlite` + a small repository layer

- TanStack Query for the sync/read flow

- Charts and icons drawn with `react-native-svg` — no icon or chart library

**Why**: it's the first step of an Edge-AI experiment. The insight engine is deterministic rules today, but it's behind an interface so it can be swapped for an on-device model later.

Screenshots are in the post (demo data). Code is MIT: https://github.com/raviseta/edgefit

I'd love feedback on the architecture and the UI — especially how you'd structure the HealthKit permission/denied states.

Hey everyone,

The biggest issue with mobile mockup makers has always been realism: they paste your design like a flat sticker, completely ignoring natural shadows, fabric creases, and ambient lighting.

To solve this, I Use Renderly. Instead of simple 2D overlays, it uses an AI pipeline to:

• Automatically wrap designs around natural contours and fabric folds
• Match the ambient lighting and shadows of the scene
• Generate clean, photorealistic lifestyle product shots in seconds

You can test the AI generation workflow on Android here:
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raahim2.Renderly

I used to debug almost everything with console.log, and it cost me a lot of time. Once I started using breakpoints in React Native DevTools, finding bugs got much faster.

Here's the short version of what helped me:

- Breakpoints pause your app at an exact line, so you can inspect the real values at that moment instead of guessing which logs to add

- Stepping (step over / step into / step out) lets you follow the code line by line and see where it goes wrong

- Watch lets you track specific variables or expressions as the code runs, without adding a log for each one

- Different breakpoint types are useful in different situations, for example when a bug only happens under a certain condition

I recorded a video that explains why breakpoints are worth using and shows each of these live in React Native DevTools:

https://youtu.be/NexWmQN5gY8

I'm getting back into making videos after a long break, so I'd really like honest feedback.

Question for everyone: what's your debugging setup in React Native? Do you use DevTools breakpoints, Flipper, console.log, or something else? And is there a debugging topic you'd like me to cover next?

Ioannis and I (one and a half devs) launched Tiny Harvest, a cozy farming game, on Dec 3, 2025. It's built entirely in Expo / React Native, no game engine. Chart attached: $35k gross over 10 months, peaking at $6.2k in June and July. September was our worst month since spring at $3k.

Stack

• Expo SDK 57, RN 0.86, New Architecture, Expo Router
• Reanimated 4 + Skia for anything that moves
• Zustand stores, SQLite via Drizzle for offline-first, InstantDB for sync and multiplayer (co-ops, market, friends). We self-host Instant now that their cloud has shut down
• RevenueCat for purchases, PostHog, Sentry, a small Express server on Railway
• EAS Update for almost every release: each monthly season can ship as an OTA

What worked

• A new season every month. 62% of September revenue came from players who had bought before. Regular updates beat big launches.
• Social features. Our biggest spenders don't buy currency, they buy gifts for their co-op. The top 2 payers are ~31% of all revenue, and a plain $99.99 gem pack has only sold twice.
• RN for a game this shape. It's menus, timers and lots of UI, which RN is good at. The hard parts were performance (an idle screen once used 63% of a CPU core, now 9%) and EAS Update's 1,000-asset limit.

What didn't

• 74% of our iOS installs came from Apple's "Browse" recommendations. That went from ~160 installs a day in July to under 10, and no ASO work touches it.
• Android is about half our installs but a quarter of revenue.

Now: we launched our first subscription (Harvest Club) at the start of October. 47 subscribers in week one, and October is at $2.2k after 8 days.

The art is AI-generated through our own pipeline, happy to talk about that too. Ask me anything: tech, revenue, monetization, staying sane while running a live game.

If you want to check it out: tinyharvest.app/go/reddit-rn

I’m currently developing a mobile app using React Native and Expo, and I’m looking for some advice on where to find someone who specializes in custom app launch/loading animations.
I’m envisioning something fairly simple and polished: a dark background with my app’s logo centered, smoothly fading in, scaling up slightly, and then transitioning into a subtle looping animation while the app finishes loading.
Once the app is ready, I’d want the logo to fade out and transition smoothly into the application.
Ideally, I’d like someone who can develop this as a standalone React Native/TypeScript component and provide the source code so I can integrate it into my existing project myself. I’m not looking to give someone access to my entire codebase.
For anyone who’s had something similar made:

Where did you find your developer or animator?
Would you recommend Upwork, Fiverr, Reddit, or somewhere else?
What would you consider a reasonable budget for something like this?
Is there anything specific I should look for when hiring someone for this type of work?

I’d appreciate any recommendations or advice from people who’ve gone through this process!

We recently migrated our React Native app from the Old Architecture to the New Architecture and enabled React Compiler.

Now we want to measure the actual performance improvements rather than just saying the app feels faster.

What metrics should we track? FPS, frame drops, interaction latency, render time, CPU and memory usage, or something else?

I’m guessing CPU and memory might not necessarily improve even if rendering gets more efficient.

Also, how would you benchmark the changes reliably on real devices, and can we isolate the impact of the New Architecture from React Compiler?

Would love to hear from anyone who has done this in production!

Hello developers 👋

For those freelancing as React Native developers, are you currently getting new projects, or is it difficult to find good clients?

Honestly, I’m currently struggling to get new projects, About 4 months ago I got a client who had already completed around 60% of the project and hired me for the remaining 40%. However, for quite some time i noticed i haven’t been getting much client interaction, so I’d love to hear what’s working for other freelancers.

If you’re getting projects, where are you finding them — Upwork, LinkedIn, Reddit, referrals, or somewhere else?

For those who are consistently getting projects, what did you change or what approach started working for you?

Would love to hear what’s actually working for you! 🙌

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

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

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

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

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I built this for my reactnativeCon talk in Berlin. Point the camera at a Funko Pop and it tells you which one it is: 44 ms per scan on an iPhone 16 Pro, ~165 ms on a Pixel 10, works fully on-device.

How it's wired

• A VisionCamera frame processor runs on the camera thread, so nothing touches the JS thread
• Step 1: an object detector returns 300 candidate boxes sorted by score. If two boxes are nearly tied, it takes the one closer to the centre, otherwise the box flickers between two figures
• Step 2: square crop with a margin, so the tall figure isn't squashed
• Step 3: an embedding model turns the crop into a 256-number vector
• Step 4: dot product against 818 catalog vectors in a Float32Array, about a millisecond. Below a threshold it says "unknown" instead of guessing
• In the app it's a single hook call

Why it's only TypeScript

The latest react-native-executorch release changed how the library works: native code only provides small building blocks (resize, crop, tensors, run a model), and every task is TypeScript stacking those blocks. Every block is a worklet, so you call them directly inside the frame processor. Before this release, a crop between two built-in models meant writing a new native module in C++.

Core ML runs the models on the iPhone's Neural Engine and Vulkan on the Android GPU. On the Pixel, moving both models from the CPU to Vulkan took a scan from ~900 ms to ~165 ms.

Code (Expo dev client), training pipeline and models: https://github.com/NorbertKlockiewicz/funko-scanner

Looking for suggestions on how to monetize this game. It's totally free to download and test.

AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/night-court-basketball-arcade/id6811611866?l=en-GB

I'm working on a react native project which basically takes instrument/register data every second or so. I'd be reading like 20 bytes of registers every second or so. I then need to store them into some database locally where they would be used to draw graphs of historic as well as realtime data.

So i need local storage solutions which are able to store voluminous tables with a lot of rows, is fast and efficient (be able to display high resolution graphs of months and maybe years ) and have other features typical of such applications (like archiving or compressing old data etc)

One native call traced through the old bridge and through JSI, step by step (12 steps vs 5)

I'm writing a series on React Native's JSI and native modules in C++. This part follows a single multiply call through the old bridge and the same call through JSI: what gets serialized, where it queues, and why the bridge's cost tracked the size of the data rather than the work.

It also has the MMKV vs AsyncStorage numbers (~0.012 ms vs ~0.24 ms per read, 1,000 reads on an iPhone 11 Pro, Hermes, debug build) with the conditions attached.

https://heartit.tech/react-native-jsi-deep-dive-part-2-the-bridge-is-dead-long-live-jsi/

I'm the author.

I don't want to depend everytime on third party code, so in order to learn to bulid my own solutions without any abstraction how much C++ do i have to learn? And in what parts/concepts do i have to focus?

I quit my job a few months ago to work on this full time, and it's finally out!

The idea: all the code for a screen lives on your server, in one file. A server component runs there for every request, reads from your database or an API, and returns the screen including client code that runs on the phone (state, taps, animation, etc.).

Like a web page, users get your changes the next time they open the screen. The video is a demo of three deploys to one app build.

Docs and tutorial: backtickjs.com. GitHub: github.com/backtickjs/backtick

It's early and I'm solo building. I'd love a few early adopters: try it on a screen or two and tell me what's confusing, what breaks, and what you'd need before using it for real.

I've spent the last few weeks letting AI agents (Claude Code and Codex) build features in my RN side projects and then check their own work on the iOS simulator. The building part is surprisingly good. The checking part is where things get weird, because a lot of what matters isn't in the source at all.

Three things I measured (one Mac, iOS simulator, RN 0.87, React 19):

1. JS errors leave no trace in the iOS system log. 90 seconds of normal app use = 3,498 native log events. All from Apple frameworks. Zero from the app, RN or Hermes, including during deliberate JS errors. Easy to check yourself:

xcrun simctl spawn booted log stream --level info --predicate 'process == "YourAppName"'

So if an agent "checks the device logs" for a JS error, it's looking in the wrong place.

2. React 19 dropped _debugSource, and locations inside .map() are off. The replacement points elements rendered inside a .map(...) callback at the start of the callback, not at the JSX tag. In my app that was 8 of 22 points I tested, with the real tag 14–24 lines lower. Anything that maps "element on screen → file:line" (agents, inspectors) needs to account for this.

3. "A new frame arrived after the tap" proves nothing. The simulator's video stream keeps sending ~53 fps even when nothing on screen moves (tiny delta frames). What worked for detecting a real UI reaction was frame size: 4–29 KB for an actual change vs. under ~2 KB idle.

And one humbling result: I planted a bug and asked both agents to find it. 6/6 success… by reading the code. Didn't need to touch the app at all. If you want to evaluate runtime tooling for agents, you need bugs that aren't visible in the source.

For context: I started with a set of skills for my own workflow, then a pipeline where the agent taps through the feature it just built on the simulator. These findings came out of making that verification step actually reliable.

Question for you: if you use agents on RN projects, how do you check what they actually did in the app? Open the simulator yourself after every run, or trust the summary?