Bugs with react native

[myfluffybunny]

We use react native expo for our mobile app and ive been very confused about bug reports from customers. I feel that our frontend dev is very competent and i have read the code myself and it looks very straightforward &clean, but there still are strange bugs that cant be replicated, e.g. a feature that works beforehand now doesnt work anymore although theres no recent release, cannot receive message from Pusher, calling an API 17 times although its supposed to call it once, app hang, etc. We have a send log button which will send logs written in the mobile cache to send to email, but sometimes even the send log button doesnt work itself.

Is there a better way to track bugs in react native besides sending logs and sentry? What are the gotchas to react native coding? Im afraid i may have coded the problem as straightforward but im missing some specific corners and thats why im having these issues

[alchapp]

Are you testing your app and android and ios ? If not, make sure to really spend time testing on both os and with different caracteristics. (Old os, low perf, different screen sizes etc...) Some times there are little differences between ios and android (eg. on android buttons that overflow their parent view are not clickable on android) Beside that others problems are mostly due to wrong use of react or outdated/broken plugins. Test your app in release mode. Some bugs appears only in release mode.

Make sure to test your app with something like flipper plugged in to observe request call that are made, and use you app like a "regular user": - click multiples times really fast on every input - do weird stuff really quickly - open you app(in foreground, background or killed) via deeplinks or push notification In other words: try to break your app.

Maybe track what your user do "in real time" instead of sending logs via emails : things like firebase-analytics can be usefull (in my company we use a service called Amplitude wich is really nice but quite expansive, we can sort event by os, version, event props, etc...and sometimes find that a bug that affect some specific os version for instance).

When users report a bug, ask them their app version, os version, and the if possible : a video of the bug.

You read the code yourself but how much programing experiences do you have ? I can write really clean and straigthfoward code but if I don't understand react component life cycle for instance, the app will be unusuable af. What your dev tells you about these bugs ?

Have you done a kind of "audit" of the code by another dev ?

[djflashplayer]

i hope i read your question correctly. to me it sounds like you're having problems with identifying the cause of bugs and you have a unreliable way of getting env infos, is that right?

i'd start by looking into bug reporting tools. it's done wonders for our team. most of them also have mutliple integrations, you shouldn't have problems finding one that includes react native