The Ghost Player - A Memory Story

TF1 rebuilt its news app with React Native, integrating its existing iOS and Android video players through a custom bridge. In February 2023, Bugner replaced background players with placeholders to reduce the number of active players, but removed players kept playing audio.

Bugner uses Xcode’s Memory Graph to inspect objects and their references, then explains how view managers register native components, create views, and handle prop changes. In the old architecture, the UI Manager inserts a native view into the tree and removes it when the React component unmounts, allowing it to be released if no strong references remain.

The player remained alive because a Player Controller outside the React tree still referenced it. The team fixed the issue by destroying that controller during native cleanup; a separate iOS 15 issue after upgrading React Native Screens required a patch and remained in progress.

In the new architecture, Codegen generates native prop definitions from TypeScript, and the view registry can keep removed views in a recycling pool. A later player may reuse the same native view, so its controller can continue playing unless cleanup runs in the prepare-for-recycle callback or recycling is disabled for that component.

View recycling avoids recreating native views and can improve performance; the pool is flushed when memory use gets too high. Android has a similar reuse mechanism, but Bugner found it was behind a feature flag and noted that the team was still measuring its performance benefits.