u/Falcon-Remarkable

react-native-android-widgets v1.3.0 — widgets now update in the background
Hey everyone, just pushed a new version of my library for building Android (and iOS) home screen widgets with React Native.

The main focus of this release is background and live updates — the previous version only updated widgets when the app was open. That's fixed now.

What's new:
Android background fetch — uses WorkManager + Headless JS to run your JS fetch logic on a schedule, even when the app is killed. Min interval is 15 min (OS constraint).

iOS WidgetKit fetch mode: update RNWidget.swift to point at your API endpoint. WidgetKit fetches it and refreshes the widget natively.

type: "clock" component: maps to Android's TextClock view, self-updates every minute forever, survives reboots, no app needed.

refreshInterval prop on WidgetCanvas — periodic bitmap re-capture while foregrounded, for custom-styled live widgets.

Install: npm i react-native-android-widgets
Happy to answer questions or take feedback.

I published this article on system design for mobile engineers, this is an introduction and there will be more chapters moving forward.

I’m glad a lot of people found this helpful so I created an IOS support.

So you can also use it to create a widget on iOS on your react-native app.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-android-widgets

https://medium.com/p/how-to-ship-updates-to-your-expo-app-without-touching-the-app-store-d7944ab4c764?source=social.tw