[v3] Pressable inside ScrollView + react-native-screens crashes with "GestureDetector must have at least one child node"

[joshwilkerson]

Description

After upgrading from 2.31.1 to 3.0.2 (also happens on 3.1.0), our app crashes with SIGABRT the first time a screen with a Pressable inside a ScrollView mounts. No interaction needed — it crashes on the very first layout pass.

The assertion is in RNGestureHandlerDetectorShadowNode.cpp:

react_native_assert(
    !children.empty() &&
    "GestureDetector must have at least one child node.");

We only saw this once the Pressable was nested inside a ScrollView, which was itself inside a react-native-screens screen (RNSScreen). A plain Pressable with no such nesting did not crash for us.

I confirmed this assertion is unchanged on current main as of this report (identical to the code shipped in 3.0.2), so this doesn't look fixed yet. It was introduced by #3981, which relaxed the previous children.size() == 1 assertion to !children.empty() to support multi-child detectors — but doesn't appear to guard against the detector receiving zero children during layout, which is what we're hitting.

Steps to reproduce

1. Put a Pressable (from react-native-gesture-handler) inside a ScrollView.
2. Put that ScrollView inside a screen managed by react-native-screens (e.g. any React Navigation native-stack or Expo Router screen).
3. Launch the app and navigate to that screen — no tap or scroll required.

Reproduction

We don't have a minimal Snack/repo isolated yet — happy to put one together if it would help triage. The crash reproduces reliably (2/2 cold launches) in our Expo Router app under the conditions above.

Crash log

Exception Type:  EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Triggered by Thread: com.facebook.react.runtime.JavaScript

abort
__assert_rtn
YogaLayoutableShadowNode::layout (YogaLayoutableShadowNode.cpp:709)
YogaLayoutableShadowNode::layout (YogaLayoutableShadowNode.cpp:732)
RNGestureHandlerDetectorShadowNode::layout (RNGestureHandlerDetectorShadowNode.cpp:73)
... (repeats) ...
ScrollViewShadowNode::layout (ScrollViewShadowNode.cpp:62)
... (repeats) ...
RNSScreenShadowNode::layout (RNSScreenShadowNode.cpp:122)
... (repeats) ...
YogaLayoutableShadowNode::layoutTree (YogaLayoutableShadowNode.cpp:674)

Reproduced identically on two separate cold launches.

Gesture Handler version

3.0.2 (also reproduces on 3.1.0)

React Native version

0.85.3

Platforms

iOS

JavaScript runtime

Hermes

Workflow

Using Expo Prebuild or an Expo development build

Architecture

New Architecture (Fabric)

Build type

Debug mode

Device

iOS simulator

Acknowledgements

Yes

[github-actions]

Hey! 👋

It looks like you've omitted a few important sections from the issue template.

Please complete A link to a Gist, an Expo Snack or a link to a repository based on this template that reproduces the bug. section.

[github-actions]

Hey! 👋

The issue doesn't seem to contain a minimal reproduction.

Could you provide a snack or a link to a GitHub repository under your username that reproduces the problem?

[m-bert]

Hi @joshwilkerson! Thank you for reporting this issue

We don't have a minimal Snack/repo isolated yet — happy to put one together if it would help triage.

It would be great if you could do it. I've tried to reproduce it and unfortunately I was unable to do so 😞