Expo on iOS is constantly refreshing my React Native app on MacOS, caused by Dropbox / iCloud

It turns out this happened because my app's code was stored inside a Dropbox folder. (The same applies to iCloud backups.)

I guess that Dropbox's / iCloud's syncing interferes with watchman or other Expo / React Native internals.

I solved the problem by removing the app's directory from my Dropbox folder.

For all the people who have this problem on Mac because of iCloud downloading the folder, if you rename a folder to "tmp" then iCloud will skip it.

Do you have watchman installed?

The React Native packager ("metro bundler") watches your app directory for changes and reloads the app whenever a file is changed in the directory, oddly this doesn't cause any problems for me when I use Dropbox, though.