🔧 🚀 Introducing `react-native-sync-tasks`: Native JSI-Powered Background Polling for React Native

Have you ever needed to periodically fetch data from a remote API in your React Native app? Maybe you're building a chat client that needs to poll for new messages, or a dashboard that refreshes every few seconds with updated metrics?

Most developers end up writing something like this:

useEffect(() => {
  const interval = setInterval(async () => {
    const response = await fetch("https://your-api.com/status");
    const data = await response.json();
    // do something
  }, 1000);

  return () => clearInterval(interval);
}, []);

This works... until it doesn’t:

• Multiple polling tasks run in parallel and get messy ☠️
• You start hitting battery and performance issues 🚨
• You want to stop polling when navigating away — but forget 🧠
• You waste cycles processing identical data over and over 📉

That’s why I built react-native-sync-tasks — a blazing-fast, native JSI-based background task manager for React Native, written in C++ and Rust, with a clean and intuitive JS API.

🧠 Why use SyncTasksManager?

✅ Execute all periodic tasks natively, not in JS timers
✅ Callback only fires when the data has actually changed (via hash check)
✅ Manage multiple polling tasks through a single manager
✅ Zero runtime JS dependencies — built from the ground up with performance in mind

✨ Features

• 🔁 Periodic HTTP polling with configurable interval
• 📡 onData callback when data is received (only if changed)
• ❌ onError callback for failed requests
• 🧵 Native execution via C++/Rust (JSI)
• 🧠 Smart deduplication (response body hash)
• ✅ Centralized control over all background tasks

🚀 Quick Example

import { createTask, SyncTasksManager } from 'react-native-sync-tasks';

const task = createTask({
  config: {
    url: 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1',
    interval: 2000,
  },
  onData: (data) => console.log('DATA:', data),
  onError: (err) => console.error('ERROR:', err),
});

SyncTasksManager.addTask(task);
SyncTasksManager.startAll();

📦 Installation

npm install react-native-sync-tasks

Don’t forget to run pod install on iOS.

🛠 Under the Hood

The library is built entirely with native performance in mind:

• 📦 Rust handles the HTTP requests & response hashing
• ⚙️ C++ bridges it all with React Native via JSI
• 🔁 No polling or logic handled in JS — it's native & efficient

🔍 Use cases

• 🔄 Real-time metrics dashboard
• 💬 Periodic chat polling
• 📲 IoT device status updates
• 🔔 Rechecking a backend queue or message feed

🔗 Links

• GitHub: pioner92/react-native-sync-tasks
• NPM: react-native-sync-tasks

If you’re building something that needs to sync, poll, or watch APIs over time — give it a shot and let me know what you think! Contributions and feedback are very welcome 🙌