Control focus and suspense

When implementing React hooks around navigation focus or React Suspense:

1) Treat focus/mount as distinct

• If you use useFocusEffect to run data refetches, remember the callback also runs on initial mount. Skip the first run when appropriate.
• Effects clean up when the screen/component goes out of focus.

2) For Suspense + prefetch, don’t “prefetch with suspense”

• If the goal is to warm the cache without extending the current Suspense fallback, use dedicated prefetch hooks (e.g., usePrefetchQuery / usePrefetchInfiniteQuery) rather than forcing suspense queries just to prefetch.

3) Avoid re-renders for non-UI-affecting query observers

• When you mount a query only to trigger background fetching (and not to render its result), suppress observer-triggered updates (e.g., notifyOnChangeProps: []).

4) Don’t expect placeholderData to work with useSuspenseQuery

• With suspense, loading UI is handled by Suspense/ErrorBoundary; use startTransition when changing query keys to avoid unwanted fallback churn.

Example (focus refetch with correct skip, plus cache-warming prefetch without suspense):

import { useFocusEffect } from '@react-navigation/native'
import { useQueryClient } from '@tanstack/react-query'

function useRefreshOnFocus(refetch: () => Promise<unknown>) {
  const queryClient = useQueryClient()

  useFocusEffect(
    // If you keep local “first run” logic, ensure you skip the initial mount run.
    (callback) => {
      // callback pattern used by React Navigation; you can also use a ref.
      let isFirst = true

      const run = async () => {
        if (isFirst) {
          isFirst = false
          return
        }
        // Prefer explicit query behavior rather than always invoking refetch()
        queryClient.refetchQueries({ queryKey: ['posts'], stale: true, type: 'active' })
      }

      run()
      return callback()
    },
    [queryClient]
  )
}

Key checklist before approving PRs:

• Does useFocusEffect logic explicitly handle the initial mount run?
• Do you use prefetch-only hooks for Suspense prefetching (not suspense queries)?
• Are “background-only” queries preventing unnecessary re-renders (notifyOnChangeProps: [])?
• Are you using startTransition for query-key updates instead of relying on placeholderData with useSuspenseQuery?