News
Making Desktop apps with Electron, React Native, and Expo
Expo support for Electron is now in alpha! Why is this cool? Well now you have the ability to create a web, mobile, and desktop application all within the same codebase. A good intro read from Evan Bacon from the Expo team.
React Native Memory profiling (JSC vs V8 vs Hermes)
Walmart Labs discusses a memory issue they were facing on Android - which became especially apparent due to a react native flat list with a large number of items (~1k) - and what they learned by comparing a few different JS engines.
Sponsored Link
Tutorials

React Native: How To Build a Home Screen Widget for iOS and Android
Learn how to build a native widget for iOS and Android and share information with your React Native app. Andre wrote an easy-to-follow tutorial on this - even explaining why writing the widget purely with React Native doesn't work.
Advice from a short timing React Native mobile project with high stakes
Andréas and his team recently launched an app for an international event that hit 100K downloads in six weeks. In this writeup, he outlines some good tips to keep in mind to prepare you for your app's launch.

Implement Firebase Phone Authentication in React Native Apps
The web is filled with tutorials on how to authenticate your apps with a variety of social services, but this is the first one I've seen on how to use Firebase to setup one-time-passcode authentication.
Open Source
oblador/flipper-plugin-react-native-performance: Inspect React Native performance with Flipper
invertase/react-native-apple-authentication: A React Native library providing support for Apple Authentication on iOS.
tuantvk/monalisa-ui: MonalisaUI ✨ React Native UI Library
nartc/react-native-barcode-mask: BarcodeMask Component for RNCamera
davideddr/react-native-hook-form-builder: Form builder with react native components build with react hook form
Videos
React Native at Wix - Architecture For App in Scale
Interesting talk from from the Wix Israel team. I've personally been curious on Wix's investment into RN as they have some great open source libraries available - and this talk dives a bit deeper into answering that question.
Build once in React - publish to web, mobile, and desktop!
Happy Holidays, ya'll!
Here's a bit of a lighter issue to get you through to the new year. Apologies to anyone who ended up with a broken link or two in the last issue - trying to subvert the Medium paywall got the best of me in the end.
After this issue we'll be off for a few weeks - see you all in 2020!
Michael Lefkowitz