Integration in Expo

This track covers integrating the Airborne React Native SDK into an Expo app. Airborne boots before React Native mounts, fetches the latest JavaScript bundle and assets described by your release config, and hands React Native the path to boot from — exactly as in the plain React Native track. The only difference is where the native wiring goes: Expo manages its own ReactActivityDelegate, ReactNativeHost, and AppDelegate, so the Airborne pieces are layered on top of Expo's wrappers rather than replacing them.

Prerequisites

• An Expo app that uses Expo's bare/prebuild native projects (the android/ and ios/ directories must exist — Airborne integrates at the native layer and cannot run in Expo Go).
• React Native's New Architecture enabled (the Expo wrappers and code samples below assume it).
• A release URL of the form https://airborne.juspay.in/release/<organisation>/<application>, or a self-hosted release config JSON.
• The airborne-react-native package installed (see below).

Expo Go is not supported

Airborne wires into the native launch sequence, so the app must be built with the native projects present (expo prebuild / a development or release build). It will not work under Expo Go.

How it differs from bare React Native

The Airborne classes are identical across both tracks — the Expo integration simply wraps them in Expo's own delegates so Expo's lifecycle hooks keep running:

Concern	Plain React Native	Expo
Activity delegate	AirborneReactActivityDelegate returned directly	AirborneReactActivityDelegate wrapped in ReactActivityDelegateWrapper
React Native host	AirborneReactNativeHost returned directly	AirborneReactNativeHost wrapped in ReactNativeHostWrapper
JS main module name	index	.expo/.virtual-metro-entry
App delegate base class	UIResponder, UIApplicationDelegate	ExpoAppDelegate
iOS launch hooks	one application(_:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:)	three application functions — update only didFinishLaunchingWithOptions
React Native module name (iOS)	your app name	"main"

Installing the SDK

The SDK is published to npm as airborne-react-native. Add it to your package.json:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "airborne-react-native": "^0.37.0"
  }
}

Then install and regenerate the native projects:

npm install
npx expo prebuild

The SDK is also available from the GitHub repository.

Integration outline

Work through these pages in order:

1. Android setup — add the Maven repository, wrap AirborneReactActivityDelegate and AirborneReactNativeHost in Expo's wrappers, and initialize Airborne in MainApplication.
2. iOS setup — add a bridging header, initialize Airborne in your ExpoAppDelegate, and implement the AirborneDelegate extension.
3. Bundling the release config — ship a release_config.json for the first-boot / offline fallback.

The JS API and events are identical

Once the native wiring is in place, the JavaScript surface and the SDK event stream are the same as the plain React Native track — there is nothing Expo-specific in JavaScript. See the references:

• JavaScript API — readReleaseConfig, getBundlePath, getFileContent.
• Android API and iOS API — the native callbacks you implement.
• Callbacks & events — the full SDK event catalogue delivered to onEvent.