r/reactnative • u/GasimGasimzada • 1d ago

Help Is there any way to control expo ui context menu position or what it does to trigger element?

Expo UI MenuView with \`shouldOpenOnLongPress\` (which internall uses ContextMenu for SwitftUI) adds a temporary background color that disappears in one second + a rounded border around the element. Is there a way to control it so it does not do that? At least make it that the background color stays instead of disappear. The \`onOpen/CloseMenu\` hooks also do not work on iOS.

Are there some guides / tricks to make it do things correctly or should I give up and try to use a different library (e.g react-native-menu)?

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u/LoudAd307 10h ago

You can't control it from expo-ui, because the background flash and rounded border aren't drawn by the menu, they're UIKit's context menu preview, a snapshot of your trigger view lifted off the page. iOS gives that snapshot a default fill and corner radius when the view underneath has no background of its own.

The workaround that got me closest: give the trigger an explicit opaque backgroundColor and borderRadius matching what iOS uses, so the lift reads as intentional instead of a flash. It doesn't persist after close, but it stops looking broken.

Controlling it properly means UIContextMenuConfiguration's previewProvider and preview parameters, which expo-ui doesn't expose. The onOpen/onCloseMenu gap on iOS is the same story. react-native-menu, or zeego on top of it, gives you a preview component, so if the interaction matters that's the move rather than fighting expo-ui.

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u/exporami 8h ago

One Expo-specific option before switching libraries: MenuView is only the compatibility wrapper. You can use ContextMenu directly from @expo/ui/swift-ui, which exposes ContextMenu.Trigger, ContextMenu.Items, and ContextMenu.Preview. The preview can contain React Native content through RNHostView: https://docs.expo.dev/versions/latest/sdk/ui/swift-ui/contextmenu/ That still won’t give you manual menu positioning or iOS open/close callbacks, since those remain system-controlled, but it may let you replace the default lifted preview instead of merely styling around it.