No matter how skilled your team is, there are always oversights when developing. The most serious of which can usually be found in your package.json file or similar. With version numbers everywhere, it is not uncommon for a minor version to jump a few steps ahead and implode the expected functionality of your organized system. Fortunately, as developers, we expect this and allocate reasonable amounts of time to either fix or get ahead of, these potential bugs before they rear their ugly heads.

Getting ahead of the React-Native 60+ upgrade was exactly what we did at [company] a few months ago. After taking the app as close as we could to 60, we finished on version 0.59.9; leaving us with the challenge to make the jump. At first glance, we were just jumping a minor, yet in every practical sense we were tackling not one, but two 'major' jumps all the way up to 0.61.4, which brought serious changes to our module linking and more.

Over the course of this journey, we moved through stack overflow, discord channels, and OS Repos, leaving behind a wake of open issues and open PRs all the way from RNCommunity-CLI to Microsoft/react-native-code-push. We broke absolutely everything, dealt with thousands of flow errors on the daily, and eventually emerged with six glorious green builds; local, device and CI/CD for both Android and IOS.

Join me as I take you back to the chaos that was the RN Upgrade, and how to deal with all the unexpected changes that will get thrown your way should you find yourself needing to jump majors in the near future.