Flipper has been an integral part of the mobile development process at Meta for years. We've been proud to share our internal tool with the open source community, and it has been amazing to see how it has grown and evolved over time. However, we have some important changes to announce regarding Flipper's open source repository.

Archiving the Repository​

The Flipper repository is going to stop receiving updates and bug fixes. Later this year, we plan to archive the repository. This means that the repository will remain available in an archived state, but it will no longer be possible to create new issues, pull requests, or make changes to the code. You will still be able to clone or fork the repository and build Flipper from source code.

While Flipper's repository will be archived. The source code will remain available to view or to fork.

Why?​

When Flipper was initially created, it was intended to fill a gap in native developer tooling. It was first open sourced in 2018, over 7 years ago. The native tooling capabilities have improved since then, and more people have stopped reaching for Flipper when doing native development. React Native removed Flipper from its default boilerplate in v0.74 and recently announced React Native DevTools. Nowadays, you can use alternative tools to reproduce Flipper's capabilities. We recommend checking out this blog post.

As a result, support for Flipper has been deprioritized, and Flipper no longer has a dedicated team to support it. While we are sad to see this chapter come to an end, we are proud of what we have accomplished and grateful to the community for their support.

We want to thank everyone who has supported and contributed to Flipper over the years!

The Flipper team

We know Flipper as an Electron desktop app that serves mobile developers as their debugging companion. Thousands of people use Flipper every day to tinker with their app and get to the bottom of tricky problems.

As announced in the previous roadmap post, we are committed to amplifying how Flipper could improve the quality of our software. We want take Flipper beyond its current role as a complementary debugging tool, provide a powerful API, and allow using Flipper in more than just the GUI context (we call it "headless mode"). Imagine talking to your mobile device (or anything else that runs Flipper Client) from your terminal. Imagine deploying Flipper remotely in the cloud and interacting with it from your laptop. Imagine using your favorite plugins for automated testing.

In this post we cover:

• How Flipper changes to facilitate the headless mode
• How it affects plugins
• A migration guide

For quite some time already, Flipper has secretly provided an experimental JavaScript SDK to support connections from browsers and Node.js under the name of flipper-js-client-sdk. With the ongoing migration of all our clients to WebSockets, we have committed to providing an official documented SDK for JavaScript clients. Without further ado, welcome js-flipper!

In this post we will:

• See what js-flipper is
• Get acquainted with how to build a Flipper plugin for a React app
• Learn how Flipper talks to a mobile device
• Dive deeper into the message structure
• Glance at what it takes to support a new platform

Over the last year, the Flipper adoption in the open source community has doubled, and for many React Native developers Flipper has become the default debugging tool. As the community continues to grow, we believe it’s important to share updates about our plans.