# Upgrading React Native, fixing `libc.so` / `libhwui.so` Android error - Mon 1st Feb, 2021

### Upgrading RN

I spent yesterday upgrading React Native in C+. This was for several reasons including trying and fix the Android error I will talk about in a moment and using Hermes engine with Android.

I also find it's important to stay somewhat up-to-date with React Native versions, as the longer you leave it, the the harder it is to upgrade.

It was actually surprisingly easy. I was only upgrading from 0.62.x to 0.63.x, so I simply ran `npx react-native upgrade`, fix some conflicts and manually updated some files manually the update script skipped using very useful [React Native Upgrade Helper](https://react-native-community.github.io/upgrade-helper/).

### Fixing `libc.so` Android crash

I was having an annoying bug causing a crash on Android. From Crashylytics, I knew it wasn't affecting all devices, but it was happpening regularly on Samsung and Huawei phones. I managed to reproduce it on my OnePlus phone too.

After a lot of debugging, it turned out it was a bug with [react-native-webview pages due to hardware acceleration](https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/29978#issuecomment-770210640). A fix was to apply the `androidHardwareAccelerationDisabled={true}` prop to the webview, which did indeed prevent the crash.

Unfortunately, I found it also prevented any HTML from showing. A workaround I stumbled upon was to disable animation on Android on that particular screen using React Navigation: `animationEnabled`.

Clearly, this is not ideal, but if it prevents an outright crash, I think is a small tradeoff for now.

###### tags: `programmingjournal` `2021` `android` `reactnative` `0.63` `libc` `libhwui` `webview` `reactnavigation`