Is this a bug report?

Yes.

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines?

Yes.

Environment

Environment:
OS: macOS High Sierra 10.13.2
Node: 8.9.4
Yarn: 1.3.2
npm: 5.6.0
Watchman: 4.9.0
Xcode: Xcode 9.2 Build version 9C40b
Android Studio: 3.0 AI-171.4443003

Packages: (wanted => installed)
react: 16.3.1 => 16.3.1
react-native: 0.55.4 => 0.55.4

Description

The issue can be noticed if you bridge to React Native the following views:

A view with elements that have a visibility to gone on the initial render won't be displayed after you've set is visibility to visible. view.isShown() will return true, but it will not be there or it will be there but not really re-layout.

A view with elements that are dynamically added, simply by view.addView() or let's say you want to load an image with Fresco it will only work if it was loaded on the initial render.

I've noticed that native components are re-layout on hot reloading, but this.forceUpdate() or changing props won't trigger a re-layout. As an ugly workaround, if we interact with the native component height or width it will trigger a re-layout, so every time you want to toggle a visibility from gone to visible or dynamically adds views you can alter his size.

I've also implemented needsCustomLayoutForChildren without notable change.

Expected Behavior (Native)

Here's the native implementation directly inflated inside an Activity.

Actual Behavior (React Native)

Here's the exact same layout as above, but bridged to react native and inflated inside SimpleViewManager.

Reproducible Demo

https://github.com/charpeni/react-native-android-visibility-issue

Related to #5531 (Already flagged in RN 0.18).