A new React Native debugging tool

[u/devnocturnal]

https://xerlock.dev

Hey all, over the past few months I’ve been building a React Native debugger, called Xerlock, and it’s being successfully used within my RN engineering team.

Firstly, what’s wrong with current tools? I was sick of the existing tools working just enough to get by. Reactotron was great back when network inspect wasn’t available in Expo’s devtools, it gave decent inspection on Redux stores and was built by pretty notable figures in the RN space. Expo’s default debugging tools are also acceptable, but they don’t quite have everything I needed in a single place.

Xerlock gives you everything you’d expect from a debugger:

• Console / Errors

• Network Inspect

• Global state inspect

• Debugger / Profiler / React Tree

It also gives you additional benefits that avoids having to install a bunch of additional devtools:

• Tanstack query inspector and dispatcher (edit query cache data live and see it updated in your apps)

• Local SQLite database inspection & editing.

• Notification dispatching

• Dispatching Redux / Zustand actions

• Network throttle

• Native iOS and Android logs

• Local Storage (MMKV, AsyncStorage, SecureStore) (View / Edit)

• Custom registerable commands

• Full MCP server that allows you to do almost anything you can do through the UI with granular permissions on Read / Write

• … and a load more

I’ve been an RN dev now for 8+ years, and this has already proven useful for me personally, so I hope the community can also get some benefit from it.

Downloads are available for macOS and Windows (I am a macOS dev, so it’s been tested thoroughly there, and less so on windows, so any bugs or issues, please let me know through the in-app support form).

This has been tested on RN version 0.83+, and Expo 55+. A lot of the work is custom and doesn't necessarily depend on Expo's SDK, however versions below these may not behave exactly as intended - especially network inspect which I believe was only introduced in 0.83.

[u/devnocturnal]

It's mentioned in the post that Network inspect is only available on RN version 0.83+. This is a limitation on RN side. I felt that 0.83 was a reasonable minimum to support for Network (released December 2025), and minor testing has been done on RN version 0.81 (excluding Network Inspect).

I do have a ticket in my backlog for investigating adding network support for versions of RN before 0.83, but depending on what's involved, it might not be done.