---
title: React Native App
---

The React Native app provides a mobile UI for users on Android and iOS devices
to interact with the demo's services. It is built with
[Expo](https://docs.expo.dev/get-started/create-a-project/) and uses Expo's
file-based routing to layout the screens for the app.

[React Native app source](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo/blob/main/src/react-native-app/)

## Instrumentation

The application uses the OpenTelemetry packages to instrument the application at
the JS layer.

> [!CAUTION]
>
> The JS OTel packages are supported for node and web environments. While they
> work for React Native as well, they are not explicitly supported for that
> environment, where they might break compatibility with minor version updates
> or require workarounds. Building JS OTel package support for React Native is
> an area of active development.

The main entry point for the application is `app/_layout.tsx` where a hook is
used to initialize the instrumentation and make sure it is loaded before
displaying the UI:

```typescript
import { useTracer } from '@/hooks/useTracer';

const { loaded: tracerLoaded } = useTracer();
```

`hooks/useTracer.ts` contains all the code for setting up instrumentation
including initializing a TracerProvider, establishing an OTLP export,
registering trace context propagators, and registering auto-instrumentation of
network requests.

```typescript
import {
  CompositePropagator,
  W3CBaggagePropagator,
  W3CTraceContextPropagator,
} from '@opentelemetry/core';
import { WebTracerProvider } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-web';
import { BatchSpanProcessor } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base';
import { XMLHttpRequestInstrumentation } from '@opentelemetry/instrumentation-xml-http-request';
import { FetchInstrumentation } from '@opentelemetry/instrumentation-fetch';
import { registerInstrumentations } from '@opentelemetry/instrumentation';
import { resourceFromAttributes } from '@opentelemetry/resources';
import {
  ATTR_DEVICE_ID,
  ATTR_OS_NAME,
  ATTR_OS_VERSION,
  ATTR_SERVICE_NAME,
  ATTR_SERVICE_VERSION,
} from '@opentelemetry/semantic-conventions/incubating';
import { OTLPTraceExporter } from '@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http';
import getLocalhost from '@/utils/Localhost';
import { useEffect, useState } from 'react';
import {
  getDeviceId,
  getSystemVersion,
  getVersion,
} from 'react-native-device-info';
import { Platform } from 'react-native';
import { SessionIdProcessor } from '@/utils/SessionIdProcessor';

const Tracer = async () => {
  const localhost = await getLocalhost();

  const resource = resourceFromAttributes({
    [ATTR_SERVICE_NAME]: 'react-native-app',
    [ATTR_OS_NAME]: Platform.OS,
    [ATTR_OS_VERSION]: getSystemVersion(),
    [ATTR_SERVICE_VERSION]: getVersion(),
    [ATTR_DEVICE_ID]: getDeviceId(),
  });

  const provider = new WebTracerProvider({
    resource,
    spanProcessors: [
      new BatchSpanProcessor(
        new OTLPTraceExporter({
          url: `http://${localhost}:${process.env.EXPO_PUBLIC_FRONTEND_PROXY_PORT}/otlp-http/v1/traces`,
        }),
        {
          scheduledDelayMillis: 500,
        },
      ),
      new SessionIdProcessor(),
    ],
  });

  provider.register({
    propagator: new CompositePropagator({
      propagators: [
        new W3CBaggagePropagator(),
        new W3CTraceContextPropagator(),
      ],
    }),
  });

  registerInstrumentations({
    instrumentations: [
      // Some tiptoeing required here, propagateTraceHeaderCorsUrls is required to make the instrumentation
      // work in the context of a mobile app even though we are not making CORS requests. `clearTimingResources` must
      // be turned off to avoid using the web-only Performance API
      new FetchInstrumentation({
        propagateTraceHeaderCorsUrls: /.*/,
        clearTimingResources: false,
      }),

      // The React Native implementation of fetch is simply a polyfill on top of XMLHttpRequest:
      // https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/7ccc5934d0f341f9bc8157f18913a7b340f5db2d/packages/react-native/Libraries/Network/fetch.js#L17
      // Because of this when making requests using `fetch` there will an additional span created for the underlying
      // request made with XMLHttpRequest. Since in this demo calls to /api/ are made using fetch, turn off
      // instrumentation for that path to avoid the extra spans.
      new XMLHttpRequestInstrumentation({
        ignoreUrls: [/\/api\/.*/],
      }),
    ],
  });
};

export interface TracerResult {
  loaded: boolean;
}

export const useTracer = (): TracerResult => {
  const [loaded, setLoaded] = useState<boolean>(false);

  useEffect(() => {
    if (!loaded) {
      Tracer()
        .catch(() => console.warn('failed to setup tracer'))
        .finally(() => setLoaded(true));
    }
  }, [loaded]);

  return {
    loaded,
  };
};
```
