// the find
craftzdog/react-native-quick-base64
A fast base64 module for React Native
A JSI-based native Base64 encoder/decoder for React Native, claiming ~30x speedup over base64-js. It's a drop-in replacement for base64-js's API, aimed at RN apps that do heavy base64 work (image/file handling, crypto payloads) and are already on the New Architecture.
Under the hood it's simdutf doing the actual encode/decode work rather than a hand-rolled C++ loop, so the speed claim is backed by a library with a real SIMD track record instead of marketing copy. It auto-registers its JSI bindings on import with zero native linking steps. The example app ships an actual benchmark harness plus a real test suite (big-data, corrupt input, linebreaks, url-safe cases), not just a README screenshot. API surface is a faithful match to base64-js so swapping it in is close to a one-line change.
3.0.0+ requires the New Architecture outright — if you're not already there, your only option is pinning to the stale 2.2.2 line, which is a hard fork point rather than a graceful fallback. It dropped its btoa/atob/shim polyfills and now just assumes Hermes provides them natively; that's a silent failure mode on JSC or older Hermes builds with no runtime check or warning. At 465 stars with what looks like a single active maintainer, this is a thin dependency to hang file/image pipelines on. Nothing in the README addresses Expo Go, which can't load custom native modules at all, so Expo Go users need a dev client with no mention of that requirement.