Building a Native QR/Barcode Scanner for React Native — New Architecture Ready

Rushikesh Pandit Posted on May 30 Building a Native QR/Barcode Scanner for React Native — New Architecture Ready # mobile # reactnative # ios # android Most QR scanner libraries for React Native share the same problems — they're unmaintained, they don't support the New Architecture, or they pull in a full camera SDK for what is a single-feature module. I wanted something lean, production-grade, and built the right way. So I built it. This is react-native-qr-camera-pro — a QR and barcode scanner for React Native built entirely with native code. No JavaScript frame processing. No unnecessary dependencies. Swift on iOS, Kotlin on Android, TurboModules and Fabric throughout. Why Native-Only? The common alternative is running frame analysis in JavaScript — grabbing frames via a JS-accessible camera API and running a WASM or JS barcode decoder on them. It works, but it puts real pressure on the JS thread and limits your frame rate. With native-only processing: iOS uses AVCaptureMetadataOutput — Apple's own pipeline for detecting machine-readable codes. Frames are never copied to user space; the kernel hands off a reference to the same buffer. Android uses CameraX ImageAnalysis + ML Kit — Google's on-device barcode scanner backed by hardware-accelerated inference where available. The JS bridge is touched at most once every 500ms to deliver a result. Everything else stays native. Architecture The module is three layers: Architecture The module is three layers, each with a single responsibility: Layer What it does JavaScript / TypeScript Public API — QrCameraProView , startScanning() , stopScanning() , toggleTorch() , useBarcodeScanner() , useCameraError() Native Bridge (TurboModules + Fabric) Type-safe JSI communication between JS and native. Codegen spec drives both the iOS C++ adapter and the Android Kotlin stub. Native Platform (iOS + Android) All camera and barcode logic. AVFoundation on iOS, CameraX + ML Kit on Android. Zero JS involvement in frame processing. iOS (Swi