How it works...

To use Reactotron, just start it (double-clicking should do the job) and you'll get the initial screen shown in the following screenshot. The tool will just wait for your app to connect; sometimes, it may take more than one attempt to get the initial connection started, but after that, things should move along swimmingly:

The initial screen for Reactotron shows it waiting for connections

After you start the application, you will see that it made a connection. Reactotron shows some details: for example, the device is on Android, running version 8.1.0, and we can also see the size and scale of the device. See the following screenshot:

After a connection is made, you can see the details about the device

When the app starts, we get something like the following screenshot. Notice the highlighted action (countries:success), the ASYNC STORAGE logs, and the three lines from old movies that we added (trivia time, for movie buffs: who said those three lines?):

When our app starts to run, we get all these debugging texts in the Reactotron window

We can also see the state of the Redux store—see the following screenshot. I inspected deviceData and one of the countries:

You can examine the Redux store to see what was put in it

Finally, I select Austria in the app. We can examine the API call that went out, and also the action that was dispatched afterwards; see the following screenshot:

The results of selecting Austria in our app: we can examine the API call and the Redux actions as well. Here, we see the
nine regions of Austria, and the details for the fifth one, Salzburg, of Mozart fame

Reactotron has, as we said, some different features, and for some purposes, it may suit you better than react-native-debugger, so it's a worthwhile inclusion in your arsenal of debugger tools.

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How it works...