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.