Android 4.x : Error while updating property 'nativeBackgroundAndroid' of a view managed by: RCTView

I have a production app that has crashs ONLY with android 4.x devices. I’m tring to make the simplest crashing app that produces this bug on 4.x devices (and ont crashing on other devices, of course !)

I saw several thread mentioning this bug : https://github.com/react-native-community/jsc-android-buildscripts/issues/132 but they did not provide a simple “hello world” example reproducing crash, IMHO.

I could reproduce it on a new clean project :

$ react-native init testbackgroundcolor
==> react-native@0.63.2[0] 

$  cd testbackgroundcolor
$ react-native start

(new terminal)
$ react-native run-android

this is my code (just modified App.js) :

import React from 'react';
import {
  StyleSheet,
  View,
  Button,
} from 'react-native';

const App: () => React$Node = () => {

  return (
    <View>
       <Button 
                    title="Press me"
                    fontFamily="Helvetica-Bold"
                    onPress={() => {console.info ("Pressed");}}
                  />
    </View>
  );
};

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
});

export default App;

Run :

• on any AVD but 4.x : a blue button will be printed.
• on a 4.x AVD, such as Android 4.4 (Google APIs) with 800x1280 : you have a crash “Error while updating property ‘nativeBackgroundAndroid’ of a view managed by: RCTView”

To avoid problem :

• I’ll remove button 😃

I don’t know what to do from here to “help”…

[0] % react-native info
info Fetching system and libraries information...
(node:13839) Warning: Accessing non-existent property 'padLevels' of module exports inside circular dependency
(Use `node --trace-warnings ...` to show where the warning was created)
System:
    OS: Linux 5.8 Arch Linux
    CPU: (12) x64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz
    Memory: 245.41 MB / 15.55 GB
    Shell: 5.8 - /bin/zsh
  Binaries:
    Node: 14.10.1 - /usr/bin/node
    Yarn: 1.22.5 - /usr/bin/yarn
    npm: 6.14.7 - /usr/bin/npm
    Watchman: 4.9.0 - /usr/bin/watchman
  SDKs:
    Android SDK:
      API Levels: 10, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 27, 28, 29, 4, 8
      Build Tools: 19.0.1, 20.0.0, 27.0.3, 28.0.3, 29.0.2
      System Images: android-17 | ARM EABI v7a, android-17 | MIPS, android-17 | Intel x86 Atom, android-19 | Intel x86 Atom, android-19 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom, android-23 | Android TV ARM EABI v7a, android-23 | Android TV Intel x86 Atom, android-25 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom, android-27 | Intel x86 Atom_64, android-29 | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom, android-29 | Google Play Intel x86 Atom, android-30 | Google Play Intel x86 Atom, android-L | Android TV ARM EABI v7a, android-L | Android TV Intel x86 Atom, android-L | ARM EABI v7a, android-L | Intel x86 Atom, android-L | Intel x86 Atom_64, android-R | Google APIs Intel x86 Atom
      Android NDK: Not Found
  IDEs:
    Android Studio: Not Found
  Languages:
    Java: 1.8.0_265 - /usr/bin/javac
    Python: 3.8.5 - /usr/bin/python
  npmPackages:
    @react-native-community/cli: Not Found
    react: 16.13.1 => 16.13.1
    react-native: 0.63.2 => 0.63.2
  npmGlobalPackages:
    *react-native*: Not Found

[safaiyeh]

@jesenko yes. We are releasing the Android 4.x deprecation with 63.4/64.0. It will no longer be supported & changes won’t be merged into master

[jesenko]

@safaiyeh If I understand correctly, this bug thus also won’t be fixed in 0.63.x? If so, I guess min API for 0.63.x should already be bumped to 21, and release notes updated - so that those that need Android 4.x support would stay at 0.62.x release…