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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

#171

Post by LeoNatan25 »

jameside wrote: post #149
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #78

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…

Modern Expo is very different and in 2023, Expo has full support for custom native code and isn't a layer, so to speak. Ejecting is gone. React Native has also become much thinner in several ways. For instance, developers write Kotlin and Swift with the Expo Modules API and uses JSI (RN's "JavaScript Interface") to directly bind the native methods to Hermes JS methods. Relatedly, the developer demographic has grown a…

Hi James, thank you for this comment.

I'm glad to hear the tech and, more importantly, the community have improved.

By "layer", I mean custom controls and animation toolkits that get bundled in an Expo-enabled project. Those are in addition to the RN-provided ones. It all adds to complexity.

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

#172

Post by jameside »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #171
jameside wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern Expo is very different and in 2023, Expo has full support for custom native code and isn't a layer, so to speak. Ejecting is gone. React Native has also become much thinner in several ways. For instance, developers write Kotlin and Swift with the Expo Modules API and uses JSI (RN's "JavaScript Interface") to directly bind the native methods to Hermes JS methods. Relatedly, the developer demographic has grown a…

Hi James, thank you for this comment. I'm glad to hear the tech and, more importantly, the community have improved. By "layer", I mean custom controls and animation toolkits that get bundled in an Expo-enabled project. Those are in addition to the RN-provided ones. It all adds to complexity.

Expo Modules Core is the only module that is bundled in. It is a small runtime library that defines the Expo Modules API used by other modules, and adds about 150 KB to a production build of an app downloaded from the stores. A hello world iOS app made with Expo ended up being smaller than the same hello world app that used RN without Expo due to the Xcode settings.

There are also no custom UI controls or animation libraries bundled with Expo. The Expo Go starter app includes a preset SDK, and when developers create a build for the app stores or a development build of their own app, only the libraries they use are included.

IMO it would be a meaningful improvement for the react-native package to provide the minimal runtime needed, namely JSI, Hermes, Turbo Modules, Yoga, Fabric, and perhaps a few primitive view components like View, ScrollView, and Text. The package provides more than a library needs. Animations and gestures today are better served in my experience by modules outside of the react-native package, like Reanimated and Gesture Handler that use truly native gestures. React Navigation uses the system navigator UI and Expo Router adds file-based routing and universal links. Expo Image adds support for modern image formats like AVIF and WebP and uses mature, performant image libraries like Glide and SDWebImage. So there is definitely still work to be done that can improve quality and reduce complexity in RN.

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