Navigating Uncharted Waters: A React Native Calendar Challenge on iOS 17

In the ever-evolving world of mobile app development, my team and I recently embarked on what seemed like a straightforward journey — integrating a feature in our React Native application to allow users to save their work shifts directly to their phone's calendar. Little did we know, this task would take us on an unexpected adventure.

?? The Challenge: As we dove into the development, we encountered a peculiar issue with opening the calendar permission dialog in iOS 17. Despite utilizing popular libraries like react-native-add-calendar-event and react-native-calendar-events, and even after scouring the internet for bypasses and delving into the official documentation at Apple's Developer Site, we hit a roadblock.

?? The Key Change: We learned that we needed to update our info.plist with new keys: NSCalendarsFullAccessUsageDescription for read and write access and NSCalendarsWriteOnlyAccessUsageDescription for creating events. But that was just one piece of the puzzle.

??? The Solution: As the standard checkpermission and requestpermissions functions faltered, we integrated the react-native-permissions package, recently updated to support these changes. This issue wasn't isolated to React Native but was also present in other platforms like Xamarin.

?? The Crunch: With the deadline looming and just minutes to spare, a combination of investigation, reverse engineering, and leveraging our collective knowledge led us to a breakthrough. The feature that was on the brink of being postponed was successfully integrated, thanks to the relentless efforts of our team lead and the entire team.

?? The Learning: This experience was a testament to the dynamic nature of technology and the importance of community knowledge sharing. We realized that sometimes, you have to pave your own path when faced with new and undocumented challenges.

I'm sharing this story to highlight the resilience and ingenuity required in the tech world. If you've faced similar hurdles or have insights on navigating such updates, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

#ReactNative #iOSDevelopment #MobileAppDevelopment #ProblemSolving #Teamwork #Innovation