Android Layout Issues in New Architecture: View Recycling and Fabric Synchronization Issues with Modal Navigation

Description

We've seen several layout issues after switching to New Architecture as documented and reproduced here https://github.com/Jpoliachik/NewArchNavLayoutIssues
I spent some time digging into the Android issues and here is what I found:
(I did a similar dive for iOS here: https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/2802)

Isolated Issue

I focused on issue 4 in the repo above: When a modal is presented over a stack, and dismissTo is called to return to an earlier screen in the stack, it breaks the view behind it and puts the app in a very weird state. See this happen below when dismissTo is pressed on green/modal, and then we navigate back to a broken view. This is a known issue: https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/2578

When debugging in Android Studio, we see an error thrown when dismissTo is called. This is thrown by React Native Fabric MountingManager.addViewAt. And then subsequent errors suggesting that the native view is out of sync with the ShadowTree.

View Recycling

Digging further I found that react-native-screens implements a recycle() function on views, intended to detach screens from old parent views.

I added logs inside recycle() and saw that React Native's error always happens first, and recycle() gets called later. So the error makes sense - if Fabric first tries to addViewAt before the view has been prepped for recycle, we would expect it to still have a parent view. And then we'd expect the screen to not render properly if it was never re-added to the Fabric surface. Why is this view not getting prepped for recycle before getting added to ShadowTree? I'm not sure.

I wish I had a workaround or a specific fix to offer, but my Native Android knowledge taps out here. I'm unsure of the view recycle mechanisms and how they pair with Fabric. But the root of this issue seems to point to cases where Fabric's ShadowTree gets out of sync with the native view state. I'm unsure how that might be happening.

Root Issue

It's worth noting: this syncing issue seems very similar to many of the issues found on iOS, which makes me wonder if they share a similar root cause? iOS is also dealing with issues where the Fabric Shadow Tree is out of sync with views: https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/2802 and there are a lot of Android issues that could potentially be attributed to an out-of-sync Fabric state:

• https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/2663
• https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/2544
• https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/2714
• https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/2629

One thought that also relates to the issue iOS sees: do we know if its okay to call updateState directly on a Shadow Node outside of a scheduled render cycle in Fabric at all? Or should layout updates be handled in JS so we can let React diff and apply view updates? I wonder if Fabric has specific assumptions about view updates that are being bypassed with direct updates in updateScreenSizeFabric. I'm out of my depth with Fabric internals to know myself.

Thanks for reading, I apologize for the wall of text but I wanted to outline all the info I collected while debugging and potentially spark a larger discussion on how to best move forward with New Architecture overall.

Steps to reproduce

1. Presend a modal over a stack with > 2 views
2. dismissTo the earlier view on the stack
   See: https://github.com/Jpoliachik/NewArchNavLayoutIssues - issue 4

Snack or a link to a repository

https://github.com/Jpoliachik/NewArchNavLayoutIssues

Screens version

4.9.0

React Native version

0.76.7

Platforms

Android

JavaScript runtime

None

Workflow

None

Architecture

Fabric (New Architecture)

Build type

None

Device

None

Device model

No response

Acknowledgements

Yes

Start with issue 4 in the NewArchNavLayoutIssues reproduction and inspect the Android paths involving recycle(), Fabric's MountingManager.addViewAt, and updateScreenSizeFabric. Reproduce dismissTo after presenting a modal over a stack, then trace the ordering between native view recycling and ShadowTree updates. Done means the view remains synchronized and renders correctly without the reported Fabric errors.