fix: dragging stops after a screen is detached and re-attached (gesture-handler v3)

[MatiPl01]

Summary

On iOS + the New Architecture, a sortable could stop recognizing drags - the dragged item gets "stuck", or a drag won't start - after its screen was detached and re-attached, for example bottom tabs with detachInactiveScreens={false}. This is issue #349.

The root cause is an upstream react-native-gesture-handler v2 limitation: after react-native-screens re-attaches the screen, the v2 GestureDetector loses its touch stream, so a drag never receives its touch-up/cancel and never ends. The gesture-handler team confirmed the v2 API can't be fixed for this and resolved it in the v3 hook API (see react-native-gesture-handler#3560).

Fix

A small backward-compatible gesture-handler integration (src/integrations/gesture-handler) that uses the v3 hook API (useManualGesture / useTapGesture / ...) when gesture-handler v3 is installed - which fixes #349 - and falls back to the existing v2 imperative builder otherwise. The version is detected once at module load, so the right gesture path is chosen without any runtime branching inside hooks:

// src/integrations/gesture-handler/index.ts
const hasHookApi =
  typeof (GestureHandler as { useManualGesture?: unknown }).useManualGesture ===
  'function';

const adapter = hasHookApi ? v3Adapter : v2Adapter;

export const useDragGesture = adapter.useDragGesture;

Not a breaking change: the peer range stays >=2.0.0 and the public types use only gesture names exported by both majors. The issue is New-Architecture-only; the Old Architecture (Paper) keeps the v2 path, where it never occurs and which gesture-handler v3 no longer supports.

Recording (iOS, New Architecture, gesture-handler v3)

Drag reorders an item, switch to the other tab and back, then drag again: it keeps working (this is where v2 would get stuck).

Closes #349

[vercel]

The latest updates on your projects. Learn more about Vercel for GitHub.

1 Skipped Deployment

Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
react-native-sortables-docs	Ignored	Preview	Jun 28, 2026 9:41pm