Hermes not working on Android

Description

Premise: we have read that hermes is not yet supported on tvOS, but we expected it to work correctly on Android.

When enabling hermes through the android build.gradle

project.ext.react = [
  enableHermes: true
]

the app is not compiling because the hermes package is not found, throwing the following error.

Could not determine the dependencies of task ':app:compilePlayStoreDebugJavaWithJavac'.
Could not resolve all task dependencies for configuration ':app:playStoreDebugCompileClasspath'.
Could not find any matches for com.facebook.react:hermes-engine:+ as no versions of com.facebook.react:hermes-engine are available.
     Required by:
         project :app

The responsible code for this is the following part of the build.gradle of the app to include the hermes dependency

if (enableHermes) {
  implementation("com.facebook.react:hermes-engine:+") {
    exclude group: 'com.facebook.fbjni'
  }
}

One way to workaround this, is to change the build.gradle dependency to

if (enableHermes) {
        def hermesPath = "../../node_modules/hermes-engine/android/";
        debugImplementation files(hermesPath + "hermes-debug.aar")
        releaseImplementation files(hermesPath + "hermes-release.aar")
    }

to pick the hermes package from the node_modules themself. But this is not the correct way and also it causes other issues later on. So we need to able to use the correct implementation of implementation("com.facebook.react:hermes-engine:+"), which doesn’t work.

Version

0.69.5-0

Output of npx react-native info

System: OS: macOS 12.6 CPU: (16) x64 Intel® Core™ i9-9880H CPU @ 2.30GHz Memory: 19.84 MB / 16.00 GB Shell: 5.8.1 - /bin/zsh Binaries: Node: 14.20.0 - /usr/local/opt/node@14/bin/node Yarn: 1.22.18 - /usr/local/bin/yarn npm: 6.14.17 - /usr/local/opt/node@14/bin/npm Watchman: Not Found Managers: CocoaPods: 1.11.3 - /usr/local/bin/pod SDKs: iOS SDK: Platforms: DriverKit 21.4, iOS 16.0, macOS 12.3, tvOS 16.0, watchOS 9.0 Android SDK: Not Found IDEs: Android Studio: 2021.2 AI-212.5712.43.2112.8609683 Xcode: 14.0/14A309 - /usr/bin/xcodebuild Languages: Java: Not Found npmPackages: @react-native-community/cli: Not Found react: 18.2.0 => 18.2.0 react-native: Not Found react-native-macos: Not Found react-native-tvos: 0.69.5 npmGlobalPackages: react-native: Not Found

Steps to reproduce

The issue is happening also in a freshly created project trough CLI

$ react-native init TestApp --template=react-native-tvos@latest

Snack, code example, screenshot, or link to a repository

No response

[douglowder]

Fixed in 0.69.5-1

[douglowder]

I think I have found the problem – RN 0.69 now requires an extra step before NPM publish. I will push out a new version and that should hopefully fix the issue.