Stripe M2 stuck in connecting state

[marvinklein]

Describe the bug
Periodically, after many hours or days of being connected which sometimes spans one or more of the forced 24-hour terminal reboots and update installations, the Bluetooth Stripe M2 card reader gets stuck in a connecting state. We use react-native-terminal via Expo. The symptoms of this state are:

• getConnectionStatus() returns a status of 'connecting'
• getConectedReader() returns a reader object with a status of 'offline'
• the M2's status lights are Scanning back and forth indicating that the reader is on and awaiting a connection
• the terminal/SDK remain in this state indefinitely and no additional events are sent

While the terminal/sdk are in this state, calls to createPaymentIntent never return/resolve.

Reloading the app's javascript bundle does not resolve the issue. The native SDK continues to return the same state information as above.
After completely closing and reopening the app the SDK returns no connected reader and a 'disconnected' connection status and we can connect to the reader without issue.

To Reproduce
Unfortunately this is extremely hard to reproduce but we see this happen consistently in production where our app is connected to a terminal for days or weeks.

Stripe Terminal React Native SDK version

• stripe-terminal-react-native: 0.0.1-beta.26,
• expo: 52.0.47
• react-native: 0.76.9

Point of sale device

• Device: 6th Gen iPad
• OS: iOS 18.6.2
• Connection type: Bluetooth

Reader device

• Reader type: M2

[dmatthews-stripe]

Hi @marvinklein , could you provide any reader serial numbers or timestamps for when this issue happened?

[marvinklein]

@dmatthews-stripe STRM26232014837 was in this state at 2025-11-23T18:41:09.981Z. It's not trivial for us to know when a reader starts being in that state since even if we were to poll the SDK's getConnectionStatus in production we'd have to use some heuristic to decide that after some amount of time the connecting state will never actually resolve or fire any additional events.

We'd be happy to hop on a call to provide more info or discuss further if you want to shoot me an email at marvin at avocadopos.com. We experience this issue almost daily across at least some of our terminals so we can provide plenty more examples if that helps.

[leggomuhgreggo]

We are also experiencing this "stuck SDK loading state" issue regularly.

Only way we've found to resolve is to restart our app (which is usually a manual process)

Can't seem to dislodge via the rebootReader or disconnectReader methods

Seems like the SDK is getting into a state where it’s just not responding.

Is there any way to "reinit" the SDK instance if it gets into a bad state?