Best practices for large-scale offline-first app with useLiveQuery + state management ?

[jonathan-pyt]

Stack:

• Expo SDK 53 + React Native
• Drizzle ORM + Expo SQLite
• Legend State for reactive state management
• Offline-first architecture with sync queue

Context:

SQLite is our single source of truth. We use useLiveQuery with some additions like debounce and enabled options to make it more manageable.

One issue we've encountered with Expo Router: when navigating between stacks, components aren't unmounted — they stay in memory. This means live queries keep running in the background across different stacks, listening for changes and re-executing even when the screen isn't visible. We've had to manually handle this with the enabled option based on focus state, which adds boilerplate.

The Problems:

As the app scales, we're hitting friction points:

1. Query re-execution: Live queries re-run on table changes, even when actual data hasn't changed.
2. Zombie queries: With Expo Router's stack navigation, queries from previous screens keep executing in the background unless manually disabled.
3. State hydration: We use Legend State for derived/computed state, but keeping it in sync with live queries creates dual state management. We'd like to hydrate observables once and invalidate manually rather than re-querying constantly.
4. No query deduplication: Same query used in multiple components = multiple DB listeners and executions.
5. Cache control: No fine-grained invalidation strategy — it's either "live" (always re-run) or nothing.

Considering React Query:

We're thinking about migrating to React Query for:

• Query caching & deduplication
• Built-in focus/visibility handling
• Manual invalidation with queryClient.invalidateQueries()
• Stale-while-revalidate patterns

But we'd lose the automatic "live" reactivity that useLiveQuery provides.

Questions:

1. How do you handle this in large-scale offline-first apps with Drizzle?
2. Is there a pattern for combining live queries with a caching layer?
3. Has anyone migrated from useLiveQuery to React Query?
4. Any other approaches we should consider?

Thanks!