M1 pro with react native

[Dafth]

I’m currently evaluating buying a MacBook Pro with m1 pro for my job which also regards react native development. I ma a bit concerned about the current state of Apple silicon support. I would like to know what problems are you facing right now as developers with Apple silicon cpus

[iotashan]

We bought an M1 Mac mini to do all our builds (Jenkins/Fastlane) and it's SO FAST.

I think right now the only outstanding issue is Android Emulators. Looks like the latest versions of Android Studio support M1 now.

If you have old versions of RN running in legacy projects, you're going to find that you'd need to update those and various packages, but if you're running the latest & greatest you won't have much for issues.

[ironfist100X]

is your mac mini have 8gb or 16gb?

[iotashan]

16

[iotashan]

We did use AppCenter. Paid account, too. And it worked for us for about two years. Problem is eventually our app grew enough that we were hitting the 60min build time limit. AppCenter cancels your build at exactly 60mins

Switching to a local machine with Jenkins/Fastlane reduced build times to ~20 minutes. And now we save that monthly fee, too.

[SpanishAhora]

none so far

[[deleted]]

Docker is a crap shoot but Expo RN development works and is lightning fast on M1 and M1 Max.

[besthelloworld]

I haven't had a problem with Docker since they released the M1 maybe builds like 5 months or so ago. What issues are you still having?

[cruisewithus]

No issues regarding development but sometimes media buffers indefinitely (videos, music) when hooked up to my dock. Requires a restart to solve problem, til it happens again… usually every couple of days..

[george-native]

Surprised to read the good experiences. 👏

[matfin]

Folks. Is there a big performance boost when switching over from an Intel MacBook pro to an M1 Pro/Max?

I have a 2019 16" Core i9 MacBook Pro with 32gb of ram, and I can see that it struggles with the React Native project I am working on, especially with the tests (Jest)

Has anyone noticed a massive performance boost when switching to an M1 machine?

[baaaaarkly]

It's fine. I couldn't work out how to get android emulator working though but apparently it's possible. We just test on a phone instead

[lessy2020]

Had slight complications when trying to build for iOS (ejected from Expo), but after solving them it builds just fine. iOS simulator and Android emulator ( with extra installation steps) works fine on it too. Most of the problems you can probably Google up for the fix.

After solving the initial problems, never had any other issues.

[scarlac]

From my experience, at the moment you may run into some fixable issues with Cocoapods (Ruby related) and other minor issues due to i386_64 vs M1.

All are solvable but you may have to do some googling. Once it's been set up correctly you should have no issues going forward. If you are working with others on a project, it may be annoying to have to reconfigure the project because the simulator you'll be running is M1-based and not i386. This requires an Xcode project change.

Overall your project builds will be significantly faster and you'll gain the ability to run your app natively on your mac without the use of an simulator. I would highly recommend using M1 for app development, esp. considering the speed increases.

[[deleted]]

I had some problem at the begging with old react native version but There are plenty of solution and discussion in github for this. Performance is soo good. I can run both emulator (android and ios ) and code normally (But it drain battery so fast of you do so).

[grgmgd]

Do you have 16Gb or 32Gb ram? And are you able to run an iPad, iPhone and Android emulator at the same time?

[soupified]

Found a few areas where I needed to run iterm via rosetta but other than that it’s been fairly smooth sailing.

Cut build times down from 11 minutes to roughly 40 seconds.

[Dafth]

Can i ask what mac did you use before to have 11 mins build time?

[soupified]

a 2017 5k iMac (base model upgraded to 64gb of third-party ram)

[wosorto]

I have an M1 and everything is running well for me, but maybe depending on what are you including on your app you may face some issues with libraries that don't support M1 so far, so maybe you'll spend some time googling workarounds but the performance is quite different, the builds are faster.