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Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

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Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#161
I also work for Infinite Red (leading RN consultancy) for the past year, help maintain Ignite boilerplate and also have used Expo since diving into React Native back in 2018-19. Even during the early days of Expo, it served me well across 3 startups to quickly get our app running on both Android and iOS. Now that it's more mature, the possibilities are endless. There are no snags or scenarios that you can no longer accomplish.

For everyone that tried it in the past and has been reluctant due to the "old Expo" of the ejection days, you definitely need to give it another try. In the industry we're in, we all know technology changes rapidly, so to not adjust your mental model after 5 years have gone by is doing yourself a disservice for sure.

The RN template upgrades are painless. It enables you to develop on any operating system, which is a big forgotten perk. You can build in the cloud if you want, but you can also build locally (via EAS or the RN cli, this is important Expo apps are RN apps and vice-versa).

Need to drop into Native code? You can do that very easily now. It's not a show stopper. Need to whip up a quick demo app for a presentation? It works there too.

Oh yeah, do you find the app store dashboards painful? Send it over with EAS Submit all via CLI. You can even set this up in your CI if you want.

Preview PRs on release channels via EAS Updates, also amazing. Your QA will love testing features in isolation. Your management will love having the product testable on their devices and you won't get bogged down when they want to see the latest and greatest for some demo you don't need to be bothered with.

The team is made up of incredible, hardworking people who want the best for the native application scene. They want the best for your development team. And that's awesome!

Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#162

I used to maintain Detox for iOS when I was at Wix, from 2017 to 2021. We ended up dropping support for Expo for plenty of reasons, some technical, some "political". The people reporting "issues" (more like asking questions) for their Expo apps, usually had very little technical understanding of any of the increasingly thick environment stack (the Expo layer, RN layer, UI framework layer, OS layer). They were basical…

Activate my iPhone 5s for iOS

Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey. I appreciate that there is a distinction between Expo and EAS. However, as a user reading the Expo docs, I'm not sure if I can separate them easily without deviating from official docs. Look at the Expo docs on building and deployment, which are essential steps to getting your app distributed. I don't see any mention of how to achieve it without EAS . There used to be an expo build but it was deprecated a while…

A lot of the docs prioritize ease of getting started and EAS has a free plan generous enough to get you to production and often beyond. The Expo CLI docs have a section on building locally here: https://docs.expo.dev/more/expo-cli/#building "npx expo prebuild" (covered in that link) is a good command to know. It generates "android" and "ios" directories with your Android Studio and Xcode projects, respectively. These…

I guess I'm just saying it would be nice to have an actual "expo build" command that can build the app locally (assuming Android Studio and Xcode are in place), to complete the full Expo framework experience, instead of using expo prebuild and letting the user deal with Android Studio and Xcode manually.

Then again, I can understand why it isn't a priority for the company.

Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#164

I used to maintain Detox for iOS when I was at Wix, from 2017 to 2021. We ended up dropping support for Expo for plenty of reasons, some technical, some "political". The people reporting "issues" (more like asking questions) for their Expo apps, usually had very little technical understanding of any of the increasingly thick environment stack (the Expo layer, RN layer, UI framework layer, OS layer). They were basical…

I learned a while ago that is not worth using an abstraction layer over the official tooling (whatever Apple and Google provides you), even for small apps I was building one for each platform (as one dev). Tried at the time Xamarin and PhoneGap, and bit later RN, each one has his quirks and things that works in one platform but not in other so in the end you end up building one app for each platform more or less, but…

As a solo dev simple apps are probably the only thing you can maintain two separate versions of? Complex LOB apps at businesses as a solo dev I could never imagine not using a cross platform toolkit of somekind. RN w/ expo is the best I have found out of all the cross platform kits by far.

If you have react experience I really suggest giving modern RN & expo a try.

Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned a while ago that is not worth using an abstraction layer over the official tooling (whatever Apple and Google provides you), even for small apps I was building one for each platform (as one dev). Tried at the time Xamarin and PhoneGap, and bit later RN, each one has his quirks and things that works in one platform but not in other so in the end you end up building one app for each platform more or less, but…

On the flip side, Unity is massively successful, and basically every indie game developer who has found any success eventually ends up porting their game to it anyway, precisely because of the cross platform benefits. The problem isn’t that middlewares are bad. They are great: Unity and Unreal, your browser, Java… The problem is mobile apps don’t make money. Games and web services do. The OP is talking about low qual…

Game dev is a different beast and in most platforms the development/tools are the same or close enough, also when building a game you rely only in low level API (Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL, etc) from the main platform you are targeting. But when you are building an app then you use the hight level API, that means you don't need to deal with font rendering, etc. You could obviously build an app with Unity, but it will not feel native, also IIRC Unity is awful when you need to input text in your game (in iOS at least, not sure how's Android side), it appears a input element above your keyboard while when using the native UI the UX is different.

Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#166

I used to maintain Detox for iOS when I was at Wix, from 2017 to 2021. We ended up dropping support for Expo for plenty of reasons, some technical, some "political". The people reporting "issues" (more like asking questions) for their Expo apps, usually had very little technical understanding of any of the increasingly thick environment stack (the Expo layer, RN layer, UI framework layer, OS layer). They were basical…

Activate my iPhone 5s for iOS

Sorry, only simulators supported ;-)

Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#167

I used to maintain Detox for iOS when I was at Wix, from 2017 to 2021. We ended up dropping support for Expo for plenty of reasons, some technical, some "political". The people reporting "issues" (more like asking questions) for their Expo apps, usually had very little technical understanding of any of the increasingly thick environment stack (the Expo layer, RN layer, UI framework layer, OS layer). They were basical…

The limitation is not true nowadays. Expo works well with Detox and listed in Detox's showcase: https://wix.github.io/Detox/showcase

Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. It's possible to make a patchset that lifts this restriction, though. If you're interested, I'd be willing to make it available.

Just to make sure: if the company goes bankrupt, will I be able to continue releasing updates etc.?

The Expo Updates protocol is an open standard specified here https://docs.expo.dev/technical-specs/expo-updates-1/

The hosted services offered by the Expo team called EAS has an implementation of an updates server that conforms to that protocol. If EAS went away or you wanted not to use EAS, you could write and operate your own server that conforms to the protocol instead.

Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#169

I've used Expo going on 3 years now, their development team is incredible. There are very few reasons to use base react-native over Expo anymore; They make upgrades to new RN versions easier, can support any custom native libraries, have an awesome build service (EAS), support OTA updates, their docs are great... I could go on and on. If you're a RN dev and haven't tried out Expo in the past year I highly recommend g…

Adding support for custom native code to Expo definitely has been a game-changer for developers. Glad it has been working well for you!

Re: Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

#170

I used to maintain Detox for iOS when I was at Wix, from 2017 to 2021. We ended up dropping support for Expo for plenty of reasons, some technical, some "political". The people reporting "issues" (more like asking questions) for their Expo apps, usually had very little technical understanding of any of the increasingly thick environment stack (the Expo layer, RN layer, UI framework layer, OS layer). They were basical…

Expo was really lackluster when I last worked with react native around 2018/2019. I hear it has gotten much, much better now but I haven't tried lately

It's the best way to build React Native apps, with very few exceptions, these days. (I have been building RN apps of all types since it came out in 2015.)
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