Mastering The Big Screen - React Native For TV

TV apps are part of a wider streaming ecosystem that includes mobile, web, and smart TV platforms such as Tizen and webOS. For Apple TV and Android TV, the speakers recommend React Native TV OS, with Expo examples and community projects as starting points. Existing native apps can also adopt React Native through a brownfield setup.

The speakers favor monorepos for universal apps, with either platform-specific apps and shared packages or feature-based packages for teams. CODEOWNERS files or package-level ownership rules can help large teams route reviews to the people responsible for a platform or feature. Business logic and state are often shareable, while navigation, UI, and video players may need platform-specific choices.

Focus management is central because viewers use a remote from several meters away. React Native TV OS provides remote event handling and focusable controls, while TVFocusGuideView can help bridge differences between Android TV and tvOS focus behavior. The speakers recommend structuring screens so focus flows naturally, and using familiar TV patterns such as left-side navigation, tabs, and content carousels.

TV apps must work across devices with different memory and processing limits; one example had a first-generation Fire TV Stick as a daily reference device. The speakers suggest monitoring memory, removing heavy screens or images when appropriate, and simplifying effects for low-end devices. They recommend sharing tests where possible, emphasizing integration tests, staging end-to-end checks across the development cycle, and testing on real TVs before release.

In Q&A, Lucas says React Native TV OS does not support Roku, and suggests a WebView approach similar to web-based TV platforms. React Native Web can be tried for Tizen or webOS, though performance may call for React on web with shared higher-level components. The speakers also note that Expo Updates supports tvOS, while Expo Go does not run on TV.