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Troubleshooting General Issues

Flipper is a 'work in progress' and issues may occur. This page mostly contains general issues associated with the Mac desktop apps (Android is mentioned) and provides steps you can take to try to resolve them.

Flipper won't launch on Mac​

  • If the window is appearing, try opening the Chrome DevTools within Flipper. To do so, from the View menu select 'Toggle Developer Tools' or press CMD+Option+I and check if there are any errors on the console.
  • Launch Flipper from the command line using /Applications/Flipper.app/Contents/MacOS/Flipper. This should give you some logs, that might be helpful when debugging.
  • Delete ~/.flipper and try relaunching Flipper.
  • Delete Flipper from your applications folder and re-install it.
  • If you're using yarn start to run from source, make sure all dependencies are installed correctly by running yarn install.

No plugins showing up for your device​

  • Check your device isn't on the list of known incompatibilities.
  • Make sure your version of Flipper is up to date.
  • Make sure the mobile SDK you are using is relatively recent (<1 month old).
  • Open Chrome dev tools within Flipper. To do so, from the View menu select Toggle Developer Tools or press CMD+Option+I and check if there are any errors on the console.
  • Delete ~/.flipper.
  • Uninstall and reinstall the mobile app.
  • Make sure the time and date are set correctly on your mobile device and desktop computer.
  • If no app plugins are showing up, there may be a connectivity issue between Flipper and your app. Check connection issues to see if anything is failing.

Known Incompatibilities​

The following devices are known to be incompatible or face issues with Flipper:

  • Some Samsung devices (Tracking Issue).
  • Genymotion emulators on Android 8+ are reported to have issues.

I see "No emulators available"​

For Android, you first need to set up Android Virtual Devices, called AVDs. You can do this in Android Studio using the Virtual Device Manager.

For iOS, after installing Xcode, you should have a default set of simulators set up. However, it is possible to delete them and there is no easy way to restore them afterwards. You can use a script like this one to recreate the default set.