[Due for payment 2026-08-31] [Partial Payment x 3][Tracking] Deprecation of InteractionManager

[mountiny]

Following up to react native 0.81 upgrade, the InteractionManager will be marked as deprecated #65991

Let's:

• Make sure its marked as deprecated so no new instances are added
• Write down clear guidelines for what to use instead InteractionManager
  • Explain the options if any and which is better at which
• Plan how to systematically migrate to the new approach

Issue Owner

Current Issue Owner: @mallenexpensify

[roryabraham]

Make sure its marked as deprecated so no new instances are added

You mean in a patch, before the 0.81 upgrade? Is it worth doing that or just pushing forward the RN 0.81 upgrade? Surely we might be close to landing that?

Write down clear guidelines for what to use instead InteractionManager [and] Plan how to systematically migrate to the new approach

Sounds great 👍🏼

[mountiny]

What I mean is basically try to already instruct people to prefer the other approached and educate them on it to avoid using the InteractionManager so we do not keep introducing more usecases of it (and add more work for us later).

I do not think we should hold the RN bump for it

[roryabraham]

So I think there are likely a few cases. By default, most InteractionManager.runAfterInteractions calls can be replaced by requestIdleCallback. We'll need a polyfill for iOS Safari.

In other cases, we use InteractionManager.runAfterInteractions to try and run things after a react-navigation transition completes. I'm not sure if requestIdleCallback will reliably wait for those to complete. In theory it should wait until animations are done, but I think it generally has some deadlines and I'm not sure if they'll be shorter or longer than a normal react-navigation transition

[roryabraham]

I also wonder if we potentially removed Onyx batching, could we remove some of the InteractionsManager.runAfterInteractions calls outright?

[war-in]

I found a new, quite worrying thing in React Native changelog

This PR introduced the disableInteractionManager flag (set to false by default) which replaces InteractionManager's scheduling behavior with setImmediate.
Then it has been set to true by default here and should behave like that since 0.80

So InteractionManager should already be turned off in our RN bump but I didn't encounter any strange issues (however, I didn't test it thoroughly too)
I think we have two ways now

• we can bring the default InteractionManager behaviour back by setting the flag to false in a patch
• we can test PR in the current state and see if something is broken

The first option is safer because we could followup with the series of PRs removing the InteractionManager usages as we planned before and the second will likely end in finding many issues (but who knows?)

---

React Native docs leave us with this short info about deprecation

Avoid long-running work and use `requestIdleCallback` instead.

so the best we can do is probably try removing some complicated InteractionManager usage and then write some docs based on that experience

Let me know what you think guys!

[mountiny]

we can test PR in the current state and see if something is broken

We will need to run the full adhoc testing on the PR either way so we can do that and see if there are many issues that backtrack to this behaviour and decide based on that, what do you think?

[war-in]

@mountiny that would be the best solution, but if the issues start popping up randomly, we should stop the testing and enable the InteractionManager again. Does this sound good to you?

We probably should also warn the QA team about it 👍

Tomorrow I'll prepare PR for the testing, as most of the library bumps are finished (wallet and live-markdown are on the way)

[mountiny]

but if the issues start popping up randomly, we should stop the testing and enable the InteractionManager again. Does this sound good to you?

Yes, we can adjust as we see the issues crop up