refactor(bridge): replace birpc with internal rpc transport

[V3RON]

Description

This PR rewrites the Harness bridge to remove birpc and replace it with an internal, typed RPC layer built on top of an explicit bridge protocol. The new bridge separates transport concerns from RPC concerns, validates incoming control messages, and keeps binary screenshot transfer support without relying on a third-party RPC implementation.

This change is needed for Harness users because bridge failures currently tend to show up as stuck runs, ambiguous timeouts, or hard-to-diagnose disconnects when the app reloads, reconnects, crashes, or drops its socket during a test run. The new bridge makes those failure modes deterministic and easier to understand.

Related Issue

None.

Context

Key changes in this rewrite:

• remove the birpc dependency from @react-native-harness/bridge
• add an internal protocol for invoke, return, event, ready, ping, and pong messages
• introduce a typed RPC peer with explicit timeout handling and error serialization/deserialization
• add transport abstractions for browser and Node WebSocket runtimes instead of coupling bridge logic directly to WebSocket APIs
• add heartbeat-based liveness detection so dead app connections fail faster
• treat the newest app connection as authoritative and actively disconnect stale sessions
• surface disconnects as AppBridgeDisconnectedError so Jest reports bridge loss cleanly instead of leaving failures ambiguous
• expand bridge test coverage around protocol parsing, RPC behavior, heartbeat handling, and client disconnect behavior

Testing

Added/updated automated coverage for:

• packages/bridge/src/__tests__/client.test.ts
• packages/bridge/src/__tests__/heartbeat.test.ts
• packages/bridge/src/__tests__/protocol.test.ts
• packages/bridge/src/__tests__/rpc-peer.test.ts
• packages/jest/src/__tests__/bridge.test.ts
• packages/jest/src/__tests__/errors.test.ts
• packages/jest/src/__tests__/execute-run.test.ts

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
react-native-harness	Ready	Preview, Comment	May 28, 2026 12:03pm