Most React Native tutorials stop at the app. Most Django tutorials stop at the API. Almost nobody covers what it actually takes to wire them together into something you can ship — authentication, file storage, subscriptions, error monitoring and email, all working as one system. This is the guide I built while shipping Cap That, my multiplayer meme caption party game. Every dependency is pinned to a specific version. Every decision has the reasoning behind it, not just the code. What's inside — 24 pages React Native 0.74 bare workflow setup, folder structure, and a typed Axios client with silent JWT refresh Django 5 + DRF on Railway — settings, Procfile, health check endpoint, environment variables Cloudflare R2 media bucket using presigned upload URLs, so your server never handles a file byte Google Sign-In and Apple Sign-In end to end, including the Apple Developer Portal steps that trip everyone up Sentry error monitoring wired into both Django and React Native, with noise filtering RevenueCat for cross-platform subscriptions plus a Django webhook to keep subscription state in sync Resend for transactional email, Zoho for support@, and a Django Admin that's hardened and actually useful Structured logging, rate limiting, push notifications, and JWT refresh token rotation Who this is for Developers who want a complete working stack — not a toy example that falls apart the moment you add real auth or payments. You should be comfortable with Python, JavaScript and the command line. Guide 01 of the React Native + Django series. Instant PDF download.