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A convenient way to display floating UI over a React Native application

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react-native-airship

The airship floats above your React Native application, providing a place for modals, alerts, menus, toasts, and anything else to appear on top of your normal UI.

Glass sheet hovering above phone

Unlike React Native's built-in Modal component, the airship doesn't block the user from interacting with the application below. The airship has also a simple, promised-based API that lets it easily host multiple children at once. To place an item on the airship, call the Airship.show method:

const answer = await Airship.show(bridge => (
  <YesNoModal bridge={bridge} question="Do you like questions?" />
))

The Airship.show method returns a promise, so you can simply await the user's feedback. This is much simpler than the typical approach of setting up a router and writing custom state handling.

Besides the generic Airship container, this library comes with a handful of ready-to-use UI components:

If these don't do what you want, you can easily write your own components to work with Airship.

Setup

Install react-native-airship using either NPM or yarn:

yarn add react-native-airship
# or:
npm i -s react-native-airship

Next, create an Airship instance and place it outside your main scene or router:

// your-app.js:

import { makeAirship } from 'react-native-airship'

export const Airship = makeAirship()

export const App = () => (
  <Airship>
    <YourMainScene />
  </Airship>
)

Now, anybody in your application can use this Airship instance to show things on top of the app:

import { Airship } from './your-app.js'

Airship.show(bridge => <AirshipToast bridge={bridge} message="Hey!" />)

There is also an Airship.clear method that can quickly remove everything mounted on the Airship (useful when logging out, for instance).

Demo

This repository includes a demo application you can use to try out the Airship. You will need to run yarn install or npm install separately in that folder to set up the demo, and then run either react-native run-android or react-native run-ios to start the demo.