Goal : To deploy a functional and stable Android app on Google Play.
Development environment :
Expo 39.0.0
React Native 0.63
Physical device for testing : Honor 8x running on Android 10
Expected result : An Android app that doesn’t crash
Actual result : Expo encountered a fatal error: Error while updating property 'text' in shadow node of type: RCTRawText
My Android app works perfectly without any warnings or error messages during development with Expo on a physical device Honor 8x/Android 10. When deployed in production, it crashes on all devices. adb logcat gives the above mentioned error message.
What have I tried :
Checked all <Text> nodes that have a ternary operator or dynamic values dependent on state.
Empyting cache, deleting data and relaunching the app.
Asked for feedback from two other users. The app shows the same behaviour on their devices i.e. it crashes.
Run expo start --no-dev --minify to verify if it throws any errors or warnings.
Checked the apk on physical device with adb install <path to apk> . Tried this with multiple builds.
Minimum reproducible example : I can’t isolate the source of the problem. Unfortunately I haven’t installed Sentry. So I can’t really share a specific code snippet that may be the root cause.
Detailed Error Messages obtained by running adb logcat
AndroidRuntime: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to resume activity {com.meetstargazers.application/host.exp.exponent.MainActivity}: java.lang.RuntimeException: Expo encountered a fatal error: Error while updating property 'text' in shadow node of type: RCTRawText
AndroidRuntime: Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Expo encountered a fatal error: Error while updating property 'text' in shadow node of type: RCTRawText
you should keep trying to create a minimal reproducible example. sadly there isn’t much we can do to help in these cases without some code to reproduce the problem. it would be nice if react-native provided more context on these errors but it does not.
my guess is that there is some area of your app where you are using some value that changes between expo client and standalone apps. maybe this is some expo-constants value, but it’s really impossible to say without the code.
another thing you could try is running expo eject and building the app locally on android with yarn android. you can do this on a separate branch and then just switch back to your main branch and reinstall node_modules and delete any of the generated files.
I replaced Constants.statusBarHeight by an integer value and built an apk and tested it using adb install <pathname>. This didn’t improve the situation. The app continues to crash. So it’s not Constants from expo-constants that is the root cause.
I created a separate branch, ejected the app from expo and ran yarn android. Unfortunately my Android emulator is not configured since I am working on a very old Mac. I couldn’t run the ejected app on a physical device because of this cryptic error that I have wrestled with in the past without success : Could not initialize class org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.InvokerHelper
I am back into my managed workflow branch after deleting the files created during ejection, deleting and reinstalling node module and package-lock.json. The app is running in the Expo client.
The remaining expo modules are expo-location, expo-permissions , expo-font and expo-linear-gradient. I need all of them. I will not be able to do without them.