expo: [Android][emulator] Expo Go often crashes on launch on M1 Chips

Summary

Expo 41-44 crashes immediately and judiciously on the Android emulator M1 Chips Macs. I actively teach a React Native Course and worked with several students each with their own environment and none of them could get up and running with using the react native and expo documentation to the letter. I would provide an error log however, the metro bundler doesn’t output anything. I simply get an Expo Crash popup on the android Emulator. and YES I had the students use the correct M1 compatible ADV.

Managed or bare workflow? If you have ios/ or android/ directories in your project, the answer is bare!

bare

What platform(s) does this occur on?

iOS

SDK Version (managed workflow only)

No response

Environment

Run “expo start” on any blank template project

Reproducible demo

yarn global add expo-cli expo init testingblank cd testingblank expo start

About this issue

  • Original URL
  • State: closed
  • Created 2 years ago
  • Reactions: 4
  • Comments: 24 (8 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

same here

this is indeed an issue. @Kudo has investigated it and the root cause appears to be related to JSC and Android emulators, perhaps a bug in Android emulators. I’ve accepted this but I don’t think it is anything that we can actually act on.

Recommended solution: use development builds

I would recommend switching to using development builds and possibly Hermes as well, where you will not encounter this issue. Expo Go is a great way to get started and experiment, largely because it allows you to go from zero to something real in a matter of minutes by downloading the app from the store… but development builds are much more flexible and closer to the production environment, so we recommend using them for any real application.

from the expo sdk 48, we’ve set the default javascript engine to hermes. that would reduce the crash frequency a little bit on macos m1 + android emulator. if someone using sdk 48 + hermes and having expo go crashes, please let me know. thanks!

I use expo on M1 Mac pro, Instead of using an emulator I connect an android device and run the project. AVD manager still shows some warnings while installing new devices.

That’s not really ideal for people like me who are iPhone users though, it means I have to bring my old Android phone to the office with me just because Expo doesn’t work with the emulator