Author here! I worked on our babel plugin for React Native autocapture from day one. It's been a pretty interesting project. Would be happy to answer any questions you have!
At Heap, we have a concept of a “virtual event”, in which there’s a raw event data set, and then you (the Heap customer) would “define” events on this raw data through our UI. The resulting data set is what you’d normally get from traditional `analytics.track` code, except it would be retroactive to the point when you installed Heap, you can change/delete/create events (without losing the underlying data), and you wouldn’t have actually written any additional tracking code.
We have some material on virtual events on https://heap.io/product/virtual-events, and the code that extracts the raw events from these interactions can be found at https://github.com/heap/react-native-heap/blob/c2dae7ef2442a... (the function our babel plugin hooks into) and https://github.com/heap/react-native-heap/blob/c2dae7ef2442a... (the function that creates most of the raw event we send to Heap)
Apologies if you mentioned this in the article and I missed it, but what advantages does an approach like this have over creating a HOC?
If I understand correctly, you mean something like the Heap library providing a `HeapTouchableOpacity` HOC that wraps the React Native `TouchableOpacity`. IIRC we actually considered something like this when brainstorming different approaches. I think one of the biggest issues with this approach is that all `TouchableOpacity`s in an app must be `HeapTouchableOpacity`s.
This might seem acceptable at first, but there are a lot of other components that use `TouchableOpacity` under the hood (e.g. the React Native `Button`, and other components in libraries like Native Base), and these would also need to use `HeapTouchableOpacity`. On top of that, if you already have a React Native app that you want to implement Heap on, you'd need to change all of your `TouchableOpacity`s to `HeapTouchableOpacity`s. We believed this drifted too far from our philosophy around autocapture, and decided against this.
Hope this answers your question! Let me know if you have any follow-up Qs.