Upgrade React Native Dependency

[ErikSin]

Upgrade React Native

Upgrade React Native to the latest stable version (v0.71.0). Currently Mapeo Mobile uses v0.66.5.

Changelog:

https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

[ErikSin]

Patch Package for React-Native

React Native Patch Package Needs to be upgraded for new react native version. According to ReadMe we are adding an environment variable.

[ErikSin]

Moving to sprint 8: About a weeks worth of work until completion

[ErikSin]

Current problems that is holding up development.

Polyfill for text-encoder is not working. The upgrade of react-native necessitates an upgrade in react and react-dom versions. This upgrade means the text-encoder in react-dom/server is not working. React-dom/server is being used in ObservationShare.js. There is a polyfill for text-encoder, but that is not working. I have tried changing the polyfill to use polyfillGlobal from react-native/Libraries/Utilities/PolyfillFunctions and text-encoding-polyfill , and it did not fix the problem.

• First possible fix is to us v8 runtime engine instead of JSC engine, as the polyfill is not needed in v8. PR Fix: Bump react-native version to fix build failures #1040 we switched runtime from v8 to jsc (due to react-native-v8 issue #149 and #150).
  Unfortunantly there is open issue where the v2+ of react-native-reanimated is not compatible with v8.
• Second Possible Solution is to refactor the app code where react-dom/server is being used. I attempted to do this but it lead to quite a lot of code having to be changed.

Just wanted to flag this and see if there are any other considerations before I put the work into changing the app code to not use react-dom/server. @gmaclennan @achou11

[ErikSin]

Maintenance Consideration

A minimum version of node 16 is required by react-native. Unfortunately the version (0.8.1) of nodejs-mobile-react-native that we use utilizes node 12. This leads to a problem with out e2e tests (and ci), as the backend needs to be built using node 12, but is using node 16 in the dev environment. The fix is to specify what version of node is being used in CI, rather then just defaulting to the dev version. This causes some upkeep issues as dev environment and ci environments are using different versions. This is possible to do, just worth mentioning