[Announcement] Upcoming Apple requirements Spring 2024

[TheRogue76]

Hi Everyone!
As of WWDC 2023, Apple introduced a new feature: Privacy Manifests for SDKs. This feature was made so that third party libraries would be able to easily declare any sort of user tracking that might be done on their side, allowing App developers to rely on these declarations for generating the privacy report. While these requirements are optional for most SDKs, certain Libraries were named by Apple as being required to declare these manifests. Lottie is included in that list, and as of Lottie-iOS 4.4.0, this manifest is included. On the side of Lottie React Native, we have followed suit and both:

1. Declared the manifest for the library
2. Updated our Lottie-iOS dependency to 4.4.0 so that the manifest files are included

These changes are available as of Lottie React Native 6.6.0. Per Apple's instruction, these requirements will be going into effect come spring 2024. In order to get ahead of these matters, we are announcing this a couple of months ahead of time so that the consumers of our library have time to do the needed migrations.

We know you might have some questions, so here are the answers to some of the ones that we felt might be pretty common:

I am on V5, How can i do the migrations?

In this latest release, we have put energy into writing both migration instructions for V5 to V6 (can be found here) as well as updating our docs, both inside the repo as well as in the AirBnB website, so there is less confusion about what needs to be done in order to complete the migrations. If there are any issues that arise and are not addressed by the migration guide or our updated docs, please let us know

Can't you guys backport these changes to V5?

The release of Lottie-iOS 4, and Lottie-Android 6 were the push for us releasing the V6 of this library. Most of the changes made to the API were to support the new Native libs, so even if we were to do such a thing, the drastic changes would end up recreating V6 again. And Lottie V6 has been out for nearly a year now, so most of the issues have been ironed out for our user base. Another matter is that this would require an unknown amount of manpower hours, and we currently can not allocate such resources. There is also no guarantee that more changes would not be coming in the future from the side of the platforms, so it is always best to just update to the latest version so that these matters can be addressed.

What about Expo?

We are in contact with the Expo team, and we hope to help update Expo Go client in time for these changes. If you are using Expo development builds, the you simply need to update your dependency on Lottie React Native to the latest version.