// the find
infinitered/reactotron
A desktop app for inspecting your React JS and React Native projects. macOS, Linux, and Windows.
Reactotron is a desktop debugger for React and React Native apps — you install it as a dev dependency, it connects over a local socket, and gives you a live view of state, network calls, errors, and logs from a separate Electron app. It's been around since 2018 and is Infinite Red's internal tooling that they've open-sourced. Primarily useful for React Native devs who find the built-in Metro/Flipper experience lacking.
The plugin system is genuinely well-designed — Redux, MST, apisauce, AsyncStorage, and MMKV each get dedicated integrations rather than one generic catch-all. The custom commands feature lets you wire up arbitrary actions (clear DB, reset state, trigger test scenarios) that show up as buttons in the desktop app, which is handy during manual QA. It ships a zero-production-overhead pattern correctly: the entire setup is a dev dependency and a conditional import, so nothing leaks into release builds. The eslint plugin that catches leftover Reactotron calls in production code is a nice touch that most debugging tools don't bother with.
The desktop app still runs on electron-webpack, which is a dead build tool — the webpack patch in .yarn/patches tells the whole story. There's no Expo Go support that works out of the box, and the setup friction for new React Native projects is meaningful enough that many teams just never finish integrating it. The network inspector doesn't capture fetch calls natively; you have to swap in apisauce or manually patch fetch, which rules it out for projects that don't already use apisauce. State inspection requires you to already be using Redux or MST — if you're on Zustand or Jotai, you're largely on your own.