Reloading on the Simulator without shaking the device
I recently took the train to Munich, a 7-hour-ride, and I took the opportunity to working on a React Native project during the journey. Since I could not see myself shaking my phone every few minutes in front of strangers for the better part of the day, I researched a bit and found the following neat trick:
adb shell input keyevent 82 && adb shell input keyevent 66 && adb shell input keyevent 66
This emulates pushing the menu button once and enter twice, thus triggering a reload, and it works only with Android. Consequently, if you only need the dev menu to be opened, use this command:
adb shell input keyevent 82
This might be a no-brainer for veteran Android developers, but with my focus on iOS and React-Native, it was new!
By the way, there is no equivalent way to do this with an iPhone. If you really wanted to, you could include a button which is only visible if __DEV__ is set and which reloads the app like this:
NativeModules.DevMenu.reload();
Or, if you only need the dev menu to show, you can use:
NativeModules.DevMenu.show();