iOS SDK 19.2.0 / intercom-react-native 9.1.0 causes weird app crashes | Community
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Hello,

 

We are currently using Intercom in our Expo React Native app for customer service messaging. We have previously been using Expo SDK 53 and React Native 0.79.5 with the react native intercom package 9.0.3 and all has been working well.

However upgrading Intercom to 9.1.0 or higher is causing some very weird issues for us.

Our app streams HLS video where the HLS playlist contains 10s chunks of video which is presented to the user as one long continuous clip. When scrubbing forward in the clip further than what’s been buffered the stream will obviously need to buffer. Our player is using the expo-video package, but we’ve tried with other packages as well such as react-native-video.
 

Now to the issue; Intercom 9.1.0 and higher causes the app to crash when scrubbing forward quickly in the video stream, this problem is only present there and when downgrading Intercom to 9.0.3 it’s working fine again and I can scrub and pause/forward/rewind with no problem and the app is not crashing. I cannot see any logging in xcode really that can help me understand what is going on, the app just exits.

 

I understand this might seem random and not really related to Intercom functionality, but obviously something has changed in the iOS mobile SDK that is interfering with our app. I have no idea what and I have no idea why the Intercom SDK is even able to affect in this way and I would very much appreciate working together to find a solution, or we would need to find another solution as this is really scary that our customer service messaging integration with Intercom can cause serious harm and issues to our users in production environment.

 

Hopeful for answers, best regard

Berg

 

 

Hey ​@berg_dee! Emily here from Support Engineering at Intercom 👋🏼

 

Thanks for the detailed context and for flagging this. I appreciate how worrying a silent exit during video scrubbing can be. The short version: the change you’re seeing after upgrading to @intercom/intercom-react-native 9.1.0+ is very likely tied to the underlying iOS SDK upgrade and changes in our crash-report tooling, not to any messaging UI you explicitly present. Updating to the latest wrapper and ensuring CocoaPods pulls the most recent iOS SDK bits typically resolves this.

 

What changed from 9.0.3 → 9.1.x

  • The React Native wrapper uses “optimistic” dependency constraints for the iOS SDK (CocoaPods ~>), which means installing a newer wrapper can seamlessly bring in newer iOS SDK patch versions when you reinstall pods. This design intentionally pulls in non‑breaking fixes like crash-report tooling updates without a wrapper major bump.

  • Starting with react-native 9.1.0, we bumped the underlying iOS SDK to the 19.2 line. That release explicitly includes a fix for “a hang that could occur on startup related to crash report tooling,” which was rooted in our Sentry integration capturing view hierarchies at unlucky moments. While the release note mentions “startup,” the underlying mechanism can also be exercised during heavy UI/layout churn (e.g., video scrubbing with frequent layer and constraint updates).

  • Internally, we also tracked iOS freezes/hangs involving Sentry’s view hierarchy capture (you’ll see IntercomSDK_saveViewHierarchy in traces). The mitigation was moving to a fixed Sentry build and follow‑on changes in the iOS SDK; these changes were rolled into the 19.2 line and subsequent patches, and then surfaced in the React Native wrapper shortly after.

 

Could you try updating to the latest RN wrapper and fully refresh pods?

This ensures you pick up the newest iOS SDK (19.2.1 at time of writing) with all crash‑report tooling fixes.

 

Hopefully this helps solves things on your side!

Hi and thank you very much for the response,

 

Thank you for helping me understand the issue more clearly,

I have followed your recommendation of updating the the latest RN wrapper and fully refreshed pods.
I’ve done this by cleaning all the caches; Xcode cache, cocoa pods cache, npm/node cache etc. I’ve then completely reinstalled using 9.1.2, I’ve verified that the Cocoapod of Intercom is running version 19.2.1

grep Intercom Podfile.lock
  - Intercom (19.2.1)
    - Intercom (~> 19.2.1)
    - Intercom
  Intercom: 6922723f79e2a2fb2e48b35837b56785214cf526

This issue still keeps happening, and it’s still preventing from updating as the rest of my app is suffering from it.

 

For now it’s fine as we have rolled back the Intercom version to the one that we know works (9.0.3). We’re afraid of how long this version will be supported and how quickly it will become outdated. If it’s not patched soon we might need to look at alternative products unfortunately.

 

Regards,

Berg

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