If you already know how to do the image related task in Native Android, you could spike a test project and verify that it's performant on the smaller devices and the problem could be attributed to React Native alone. Then it's a matter of porting the high level API to JS.
Given that you believe this is a memory-related problem, perhaps it's because the image is too large to fit into the available memory, and having React Native made it worse.
Given that you believe this is a memory-related problem, perhaps it's because the image is too large to fit into the available memory, and having React Native made it worse.