can the native portions of of a react-native package be run and developed standalone?

React Native projects have on their root folder two other directories: android and ios, which have the Android (you can open it with Android Studio as any other Android project) and the XCode iOS projects respectively.

I would say that the react packager needs to be open so the app can fetch the JS files. I just tried closing it and running the app on XCode alone, and it opened the packager before on a terminal window.

My suggestion is: create an empty project, import that react-native-datetime package, use it on the main screen and play with it natively with Android Studio or XCode, if that's an option.

If you create a static bundle of your js files for use in your app, you'll be able to run the app without having to keep the js server running. Then you should be able to work on the native code with the your editor/IDE using the android folder on your project directory (for android).

To create an offline bundle for android:

react-native bundle --platform android --dev false --entry-file index.android.js \ --bundle-output android/app/src/main/assets/index.android.bundle \ --assets-dest android/app/src/main/res/

This should create a static bundle index.android.bundle for your javascript code under android/app/src/main/assets/

A simpler way would be to do

curl "http://localhost:8081/index.android.bundle?platform=android" -o "android/app/src/main/assets/index.android.bundle"

from the build directory.