Bearly Holding It Together

I built Bearly Fit with React Native 0.76.

Being relatively new to it at the time, that seemed like the sensible choice.

Unfortunately I took a long time to build it, and late last year Android decided to enforce 16KB page sizes.

Normally that would be fine - but React Native 0.76 was just on the cusp of the RN team enforcing the new architecture.

Meaning I can't just upgrade a few libraries and call it a day.

Nope - I need to upgrade everything!

This means I have until the end of May to:

• Upgrade to Expo 54
• Replace any third party libraries
• Upgrade my own code to React 19
• Implement CNG

With this in mind, and because I can't decide the direction I want to go with the Workout Plan UI...

This week I've been extracting the native modules into self contained libraries - complete with icons, example apps, documentation and a full test suite.

• BearlyAFileService
• BearlyASecretManager
• BearlyATimerService
• BearlyAZipService
• BearlyADatabaseService

They're all compatible with my current app and the old architecture - but also built and tested against Expo 54 on the new architecture, using Turbo Modules.

I figured this would be a good way to test these large, core components in isolation and make sure they're ready for the migration.

I'm also going to start doing the same for the 3 main app sections - Exercise, Nutrition and Life. That'll let me not only isolate functionality a lot easier, but also build spin off specialist apps (for example aimed at personal trainers and people who exclusively do star jumps).

No real reason to share this, I just like attention.

Thanks for reading.