iOS NearbyConnections doesn't work with React Native

[WolfDierdonck]

Project

Nearby Connections

Language

Swift

OS Platform

Apple

What happened?

When trying to use React Native with Nearby Connections on iOS, the app crashes with an sdallocx error in OPENSSL_free (inside of the BoringSSL-grpc package) when requesting a connection to another endpoint. Note that discovering/advertising works, it only crashes when requesting a connection.

This issue seems very similar to apple/swift-nio-ssl#189 (read the thread for more details, specifically the last few comments). Additionally, the fix used in that package here fixes the issue above.

What did you expect to happen?

No error/crash to happen when requestingConnection

How can we reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible)?

1. Create a react native project
2. Create a react native swift package with a method that calls discover and requests connection to any endpoints found
3. Call this method from react native
4. The app will crash immediately after requesting connection to a discovered endpoint

How often does this bug happen?

Every time

Standalone code to reproduce the issue

Can't provide any code for this since it's very involved. The steps above should be enough to repro 100% of the time

Relevant log output

No response

Anything else we need to know?

The workaround doesn't seem to introduce any issues so not an urgent issue, just a QOL improvement

[awaisanjumx2]

facing same problem
any workaround?

[edgarclerigo]

If I'm not mistaken this is something related to the Flipper, if you disable it on the Podfile you should be able to run the app without any problem.

[WolfDierdonck]

facing same problem

any workaround?

I linked the fix in the issue description, you just have to add an #if 0 to one of the files.

Disabling flipper did not work for me

[bourdakos1]

Are you able to open a PR with the fix? I can approve/submit. Otherwise it will probably be about a week until I can take a look at this

[WolfDierdonck]

I don't think It's a trivial fix since the change is in the SSL library, not nearby itself. See this PR for how another package fixed it

[bourdakos1]

It looks like that PR is merged, can we just update the version of the SLL lib we are using?

[WolfDierdonck]

Maybe? The linked thread said it might be fixed as of https://boringssl-review.googlesource.com/c/boringssl/+/40405/9#message-0e7e7e16e7576e76dffe8a4be77fe3b1102f4112 (pretty old though, might already be using this). However, they also mentioned that it might be a bug in Folly, and I don't think that's being tracked anywhere...

[edgarclerigo]

Hi @WolfDierdonck ,

Check the solution I posted here,

#1685 (comment)

With this, I was able to get nearby working with React Native.

Hope this helps