What's coming in 1.2.0: smoother teleportation on Android 🚀

react-native-teleport 1.2.0 is just around the corner. This release focuses on one major improvement: a reworked reparenting mechanism on Android.

With the new fast path, you should see in most cases no empty frames while teleporting views. The difference is especially noticeable for surface-backed content such as videos and maps.

⬜ Why did empty frames appear?

Teleport moves an existing native view between parents without remounting the React component. On Android, that move previously used the regular removeView() and addView() APIs.

Although the same React component and native view were preserved, Android temporarily detached the view from the window. For content backed by a SurfaceView or TextureView, that could disconnect or recreate the rendering surface. While Android waited for the next frame, the background underneath became visible as a black, white, or otherwise empty flash.

This was easier to spot on older devices, but it could also happen intermittently on newer versions of Android.

🚀 A faster reparenting path

In 1.2.0, Teleport can move an already attached view using Android's lightweight detachViewFromParent() and attachViewToParent() APIs.

The view is removed from one parent's child list and inserted into the other synchronously, without leaving the Android window. This keeps its rendering resources alive and lets the compositor continue displaying the previously submitted frame throughout the move.

In practice, teleporting videos, maps, and other surface-backed views should now feel much more seamless.

Video is flickering while teleporting	Video gets teleported without flickering

🛡️ Safe by default

The fast path is used only when Teleport can safely preserve the view's window attachment - for example, when both parents belong to the same Android window and no active focus or layout transition requires the full detach lifecycle.

When those conditions are not met, Teleport automatically falls back to the existing removeView() and addView() behavior. There is no new API or configuration to adopt: the optimization happens internally.

🧪 Tested against empty frames

Alongside the new mechanism, we added an end-to-end regression test that records a video teleportation and checks the result for empty frames. This gives us a way to catch the original visual glitch automatically before it reaches another release.

The fast path has also been tested with video and map content across Android API levels 28, 31, and 36.

✨ Upgrading

There are no breaking API changes in 1.2.0. Upgrade as usual:

yarn add react-native-teleport@1.2.0

That's it - existing teleports will automatically use the new Android fast path whenever it is safe to do so.

If you still notice an empty frame after upgrading, please open an issue with your device, Android version, and the type of view being teleported.