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Enabling Hermes

Hermes is an open-source JavaScript engine optimized for running React Native apps on Android. For many apps, simply enabling Hermes will result in improved start-up time, decreased memory usage and smaller app size. At this time Hermes is an opt-in React Native feature, and this guide explains how to enable it.

First, ensure you're using at least version 0.60.2 of React Native. If you're upgrading an existing app ensure everything works before trying to switch to Hermes.

Edit your android/app/build.gradle file and make the change illustrated below:

  project.ext.react = [
      entryFile: "index.js",
-     enableHermes: false  // clean and rebuild if changing
+     enableHermes: true  // clean and rebuild if changing
  ]

Next, if you've already built your app at least once, clean the build:

$ cd android && ./gradlew clean

That's it! You should now be able to develop and deploy your app as normal:

$ react-native run-android

Confirming Hermes is in use

If you've just created a new app from scratch you should see if Hermes is enabled in the welcome view:

A HermesInternal global variable will be available in JavaScript that can be used to verify that Hermes is in use:

const isHermes = () => global.HermesInternal != null;

To see the benefits of Hermes, try making a release build/deployment of your app to compare. For example:

$ react-native run-android --variant release

This will compile JavaScript to bytecode during build time which will improve your app's startup speed on device.