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Most NFC support questions are setup questions. A tag that works on Android and appears not to exist on iOS, a session that fails to open with an error that never mentions Info.plist, a tag that stops launching the app after an OS upgrade — all configuration, none of it visible from the JavaScript. So each page here covers one use case and gives both routes:

Expo

The plugin options to put in app.json.

Bare React Native

The exact plist keys and manifest XML to write by hand, because a bare project has no prebuild to write them for you.
The bare snippets are not transcribed. They are generated from the config plugin and compared against these pages in CI, so the two routes cannot drift apart.

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Pick your page

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Before anything else: you need a development build

NFC is native code, so it cannot run in Expo Go. npx expo run:ios, npx expo run:android, eas build and eas build --local all produce a development build that works.This is not a temporary state of affairs: Expo Go on the App Store is frozen at SDK 54, and Expo now positions it as a learning tool rather than a development target.

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How to check what you actually got

Two commands, in order of how much they tell you:
Then read the files.
If a value you expected is missing, the plugin either was not applied or rejected your options — it fails the prebuild with a message naming the option rather than writing something that would match no tag.

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What the plugin refuses to do

Options that would produce a configuration matching nothing are errors, not warnings:
  • An NDEF intent filter with neither a mimeType nor a scheme.
  • A host or pathPrefix without a scheme — Android ignores both, so the filter would be far wider than it looks.
  • An AID that is not plain hexadecimal, or outside the 5-to-16-byte range that ISO 7816 allows.
  • A FeliCa system code that is not exactly two bytes.
  • An empty tech list, which matches every tag.
Each of these otherwise fails silently at the radio, months later, on someone else’s phone.