Learn about what the Application has not been registered error means and how to resolve it in an Expo or React Native app.

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When developing an Expo or React Native app, it's common to run into an error that looks like:

In this particular error, "main" can be any string.

What this error means

An exception may be preventing your app from registering itself

The most common cause of this error is that there is an exception thrown in your application before it's able to register itself. When a React Native application loads, there are two steps:

1. Load the JavaScript code, and if everything is successful, then your application will be registered. If there is any exception when loading the bundle then execution will be aborted and it will never reach the part where your application is registered.
2. Run the registered application. If loading the code failed, then the application won't be registered and you will see the error that is the subject of this page.

If you're in this situation, the error message you're seeing is a red herring, it's distracting you from the real error that led to the application not being registered.

Look at your logs before this error message to see what may have caused it. A frequent cause is multiple versions of a native module dependency that registers itself as a view — for example this Stack Overflow thread where the poster has multiple versions of react-native-safe-area-context in their dependencies.

Your app root component may not be registered

Another possibility is that there is a mismatch between the AppKey being provided to AppRegistry.registerComponent, and the AppKey being registered on the native iOS or Android side.

In managed projects, the default behavior is to use "main" as the AppKey. This is handled for you automatically, and as long as you don't change the "main" field in your package.json from the default value then this will just work. If you want to customize the app entry point, see registerRootComponent API reference.

In projects with native code, you will see something like this in your index.js by default:

import { registerRootComponent } from 'expo';
import App from './App';
registerRootComponent(App);

where registerRootComponent is implemented as:

function registerRootComponent(component) {
  AppRegistry.registerComponent('main', () => component);
}

And on the native side, in AppDelegate.m you should see:

RCTRootView *rootView = [[RCTRootView alloc] initWithBridge:bridge moduleName:@"main" initialProperties:nil];

and in MainActivity.java:

@Override
protected String getMainComponentName() {
  return "main";
}

By default, "main" is consistently used throughout the project. If you're running into this error, something has likely changed and these values no longer coincide. Ensure that the names you are registering on the JavaScript side are the ones expected on the native side (if you're using Expo's registerRootComponent function, that would be "main").

Other considerations

This error can also occur in a few other scenarios, but it's less predictable and the fixes would be more specific to your project. For example, some other cases are:

• You're connecting to the wrong project's local development server. Try closing out other Expo CLI or React Native community CLI processes (find them with ps -A | grep "expo\|react-native").
• If this error is only occurring in your production app, then try running the app locally in production mode with npx expo start --no-dev --minify to find the source of the error.