Why does react native uses your ipport but not localhost?
Why does react native uses your ip:port but not localhost?
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localhost loops back to your own computer.
This means if your phone tries to access
localhost:port, it's trying to connect to itself.
For it to instead connect to the dev server hosted on your computer, it needs to connect to your computer via ip:port instead.
The only thing localhost:port will do on your computer is let you view your page in a browser on that same computer, which isn't useful for testing mobile functionality.
ip:port lets you do this as well as lets your phone (or any other device on the same WiFi network) connect.
a bit more technical detail; localhost is just a convenience name for a special IP address, when you try to connect to localhost, you're actually connecting to 127.0.0.1. In fact, you can use any IPv4 address which matches 127.*.*.* and it will loop back.