Android crashes when it tries to render TextInput

This is a known React Native issue with version 0.64 and later. React Native 0.64 isn’t compatible with the latest version of Appcompat, a library that’s part of the androidx namespace. When an app tries to render TextInput, a NullPointerException is thrown.

Below, as highlighted in the GitHub issue of the React Native repository, we outline what you can do to resolve the issue.

Updating your Gradle build configuration

As a temporary workaround to solve the issue, pin the Appcompat library to version 1.3.1, which doesn’t cause the NullPointerException:

implementation ("androidx.appcompat:appcompat:1.3.1") {
    version {
        strictly '1.3.1'
    }
}