• 0.71‑RC0 released Nov 4 2022, introduced Maven Central artifact publishing to speed builds. • Dynamic Gradle dependency (implementation(“com.facebook.react:react-native:+”)) caused older projects to pull 0.71‑RC0. • Build failures hit Android users on pre‑0.71 versions, breaking all React Native Android builds. • Post‑mortem identified the template’s dynamic version as the root cause and highlighted anti‑pattern. • Team removed “+” dependencies in 0.71 template but older projects remained vulnerable. • Lessons: enforce static versioning, improve template migration guidance, add safeguards against future regressions. • Action plan: update docs, add CI checks, notify community, monitor Maven Central releases.
Article Summaries:
- React Native’s 0.71‑RC0 release on November 4, 2022 triggered a widespread Android build outage. The new release candidate introduced Maven Central artifacts and removed “+” dynamic dependencies from the template, but older projects still used the dynamic notation (
implementation("com.facebook.react:react-native:+")). Gradle therefore pulled the latest 0.71‑RC0 artifacts for projects on older versions (e.g., 0.68.0), causing version mismatches and build failures. The issue was identified within hours, a manual workaround was shared, and patch releases for all versions back to 0.63 were issued over the weekend. Sonatype removed the offending artifacts by November 8, fully resolving the outage.
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