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Bare Airborne (Advanced)

Bare Airborne wires the native Airborne OTA SDKs — in.juspay:airborne on Android and the Airborne CocoaPod on iOS — directly into a React Native or Expo app, without the airborne-react-native plugin. Instead of letting the plugin manage the bundle and boot for you, you write the native boot code yourself: you decide when React Native starts, which bundle it boots from, and how the app reacts when a new package finishes downloading.

Prefer the React Native SDK for most apps

This is an advanced flow for teams that need low-level control over the OTA lifecycle. It means owning more native code (MainApplication/AppDelegate) and keeping it in sync with React Native upgrades.

For a typical app, use the React Native SDK instead — it handles the native wiring for you and is far simpler to set up. Only reach for the bare flow when you have a concrete reason to.

When to use the bare flow​

Choose the bare integration when you need something the plugin does not currently expose — most commonly:

  • Reacting to onPackageDownloaded. The native SDKs raise this callback when a package finishes downloading after the boot timeout (so it is staged rather than applied on this run). The bare flow lets you catch it and, for example, show a "Reload now" prompt so users get the update without waiting for a natural app restart. See Reload after a post-timeout update.
  • Full control of the boot and reload sequence — exactly when and how React Native starts, and how you swap the bundle and reload JS when an update is applied.

If you don't need any of this, the React Native SDK does the same OTA delivery with much less code.

What stays the same​

The bare flow only changes the SDK integration in your app. Everything on the Airborne side is unchanged:

  • Release creation is identical. You still build packages and create releases, cohorts, and dimensions from the Airborne dashboard exactly as with the plugin. See Create & target a release and the Releases reference.
  • The core concepts are the same — release config, package, namespace, resources, and the boot / release-config timeouts. See Download & boot flow.

What differs​

  • You add the native Airborne SDK as a direct dependency (Gradle on Android, CocoaPods on iOS) instead of the airborne-react-native npm package.
  • You write the boot integration yourself — initialize Airborne before React Native, resolve the bundle path from the SDK, and hand it to React Native.
  • You get direct access to the native callbacks, including onPackageDownloaded.

Versions​

Use these published versions of the native SDKs:

PlatformDependencyVersion
Androidin.juspay:airborne (Gradle)2.2.8-rc.25
iOSAirborne (CocoaPods)0.42.0
The Hyper SDK Maven repository is still required

The Android SDK resolves from the Hyper SDK Maven repository https://maven.juspay.in/jp-build-packages/hyper-sdk/ — the same repository the plugin uses. Keep it in your Gradle configuration (see React Native (bare)).

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