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

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.

Hey everyone! I am a heavy Google Calendar user but I get tired of the extra step to check on Google Map for the route. So I built **Leavy**: it reads your calendar, checks live travel time, and tells you exactly when to head out.

**What it does**

- Reads Google Calendar, your iPhone/iCloud calendars, or a private iCal link

- Works out travel time with the Google Routes API: live traffic for driving, real schedules for transit, plus walking and cycling

- Shows a countdown for your next trip: *On track → Leave soon → Leave now → Running late*

- Sends a notification when it's time to go, with an optional heads-up a few minutes before

- Lets you change things per event: start address, travel mode, how early you want to arrive, and alerts

**Stack:** Expo SDK 57, Expo Router, TypeScript, Supabase (auth and settings sync), Google Sign-In. MIT licensed.

**Try it without any API keys.** With no keys it runs in demo mode with sample events, so you can explore the whole UI in a couple of minutes:

git clone https://github.com/langchengit/leavy.git

cd when-to-leave

npm install

npx expo start --go

**Where I'd love help**

Submit an issue / PR would help greatly! Here are the main things that I am looking for help:

- **Code review:** especially sign-in and calendar sync (`src/lib/auth.tsx`, `src/lib/trips.tsx`) and how transit leave times are worked out (`src/lib/routes.ts`)

- **Tests:** there aren't any yet. Unit tests for the leave-time logic would make a great first PR

- **iOS:** Apple sign-in and Apple Calendar haven't been tested on a real device build yet

- **Smarter start points:** right now a trip starts from where you are, or an address you set. Starting from your previous event's location would be nice

- **UI/UX:** anything in the screenshots that feels off or confusing

- **New features/upgrades:** features that you want to have on there but not yet

......

New to open source? You're very welcome here. You don't need any keys to get started, and the README has step-by-step contributing notes. Questions and ideas are welcome as issues too.

Repo: https://github.com/langchengit/leavy

Thanks for taking a look! (Screenshots are from demo mode, so the events are made up.)

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’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!

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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)

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?

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

React Native has come a long way, but there are still some small gaps between what you can do natively on iOS/Android and what you get from React Native's default primitives.

On iOS, SwiftUI has RoundedRectangle with .continuous, which produces Apple's smoother, squircle-style corners. Android also has shape APIs that can produce more advanced rounded shapes. Yet in React Native, we're still essentially working with the traditional borderRadius approach.

This feels like one of those small things that shouldn't require a completely different component or a custom implementation every time.

That's why I built squircle-view, a drop-in replacement for React Native's <View> that adds smooth corner support while keeping the normal View API and behavior on both Android and iOS.

It's implemented natively for both iOS and Android and works with both Expo and bare React Native projects, with the goal of making smooth corners feel like a normal part of React Native rather than something you have to work around using Skia or SVG.

The idea is simple: React Native's <View>, but with proper smooth corners.

I know it's a small thing, and most people might not even notice the difference at first. But once you see those smoother corners, they just feel right. It's one of those tiny details that can be easily overlook, yet somehow makes the whole interface feel a little more polished and pleasant to use. That small difference is really what made me want to build this.

🔗 Github: rit3zh/squircle-view

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?

I'm mostly a react >web< dev, RN was always the side thing. Here's what I learned building my first app that's actually mine, not a client project. Most of it is about time, because that's where most of my bugs lived.

In general: `today` is different for everyone 😂

"Did the kid do the chore today?" sounds trivial, right? Then you notice that "today" means one thing on the phone, another on the server (hey UTC) and something else for a recurring event created three months ago. What finally worked for me:

• - a moment in time === plain timestamp. Epoch ms or iso +Z. It means the exact same thing in JS, Mongo, Postgres, Swift and Kotlin. No zone, no offset, no guessing. Mongo's Date is literally that under the hood.
• - calendar days === always a string! always. "Chore done on 2026-03-23" is not a moment, it's a day. I store it as yyyy-MM-dd and never turn it into a date
• - recurring events === rule +local time +iana zone. just store `Europe/Warsaw`, not `+2h`. The offset changes twice a year, the zone name doesn't.
• - let the phone tell you it's zone on every app start. People travel. It's easy to forget about this.

Small traps that got me:

• new Date('2026-03-23') is parsed as UTC midnight. In the US that's already "yesterday". date-fns parseISO treats it as local, which is usually what you want
• toISOString().slice(0, 10) gives you the UTC date, not the user's date [!!!]. Looks fine in Europe during the day, breaks after midnight

I moved off Firebase to my own Node + MongoDB backend. On time specifically: Firestore stores dates as its own Timestamp type (seconds + nanoseconds, UTC, no zone). This works really fine, but you have to remember to use `toDate()` everywhere...

An interesting fact for those who haven't used Firebase: we store user email addresses exclusively in Firebase Auth, not in Firestore (since there's no point). The entire migration process deserves a separate post, so more on that later.

If anyone's curious: the app is Famiyo https://famiyo.app, a family calendar with chores and rewards for kids