After testing our React Native app on the simulator for a day or two we, similar to a young Kobe Bryant, decided to forgo college and take our talents to the big leagues, by testing our native app on an actual device.
This is a good practice because from a hardware standpoint you’re phone is a very different device than your Mac. Because of the more powerful CPU in your computer there is always the chance that applications that run seamlessly on the Computer’s simulator run choppy on an actual device.
For our purposes we wanted to ensure that our react Native components looked and felt native on a device, and that the positive results produced on the simulator were not just a fluke.
The Nitty Gritty
In our experience the process of getting an App on an actual device is somewhat painful. To help you avoid the same pitfalls that caused us headaches we wanted to give you some solutions to the most common problems you will run into while trying to get your app on your device.
- Setting up your iOS developer account: First and foremost it is import to correctly configure your iOS developer account so that you can run your application on an iOS device. This step is easily the most painful part of the process because of how much outdated information that exists on this subject. After poking around for a bit this was the most helpful tutorial that we could find – How to Deploy your App on an iPhone
- Plugin your device and ensure that your Xcode and iOS versions are compatible: Right after your developer account is setup the next step is to check and make sure that you are running compatible versions of Xcode and iOS. If not then you will be given an error saying, “The Developer Disk Image could not be mounted”. The simplest fix for this issue is to always make sure that you are running the most recent versions of Xcode and iOS. However, if for some reason you do not want to update your version of Xcode another fix would be to set the deployment target of your application to a version equal to or behind the current version of iOS running on your phone.
- Accessing the development server from the device: Now that your app is installed on your device feel free to open it up and navigate through it’s screen. However, if the app needs to make calls to a server running locally on your computer then you are going to have to connect your app to that server. The fastest way to do this is to update the AppDelegate.m file and change the IP in the URL form localhost to your laptop’s IP address. For more information on this step checkout the react documentation at – Running On Device – React Native