I have seen already a number of border cases and strange developer interface.
From the "shake your device", which is really impractical, specially with a tablet
To working around Android studio to simulate a button press.
Is there a consistent way to do it? Can't we use a intern API to have a debug button within our app to launch such menu as navigator.popUpDevMenu()?
And if not, how do you shake your tablet to get it working. This is intended to solve How To configure HMR on a real device, too. React native does improve the development experience, but I'd say that particular thing slows it a little bit.
If you are on a mac, there is a handy tool called Frappe. https://github.com/niftylettuce/frappe
You can use this command from the shell
adb shell input keyevent 82
if haven't run react-native run-android or if the device gets disconnected after you have run the react-native run-android. You need to re-enable the development server port. You can run this command and try again with the previous command
adb reverse tcp:8081 tcp:8081
EDIT: this solution only works for android devices and is among the hacks proposed in the question above. So it is improvable. However It is selected as valid answer until this happens.