[frostik]

Just a wild guess - you said opening for processing. Depending on what you're doing with the file and how you're opening it the whole data get's passed over the bridge resulting in some catastrophic memory allocations. I would recommend tapping into the bridge communication and start checking if everything stays where it should. Some picker modules tend to send base64 encoded file beside the URL.

[silkodyssey]

The first module I tried was react-native-image-picker and yes it returns an object with base64 encoded data. What I do with this data is first, resize the image then display the resized image in an ImageView then upload the resized image to Firebase Storage.

[iOSGuy]

You definitely will want to write images to file, then pass the file path over the bridge. That's an easy solution.

I've been using React Native cross platform for over a year, and it has a ridiculous number of issues, but they're trade offs. There are benefits that come with it. React Native is just another tool, evaluate it as you would any other framework.