Moving Off React Native

Huge shoutout to Alan for making such a bold move and also sharing it with us all. Expo has made a great set of tools, really cool to see them working as intended

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[Smongo]

Why are we acting like expo is not react native?

[GaborGubicza]

I'm a 36 year old Hardware Engineer with a lot of PCB design and robotics experience, in October I decided to start learning software development: JS, at first now looking into React, React Native, I came across expo a few weeks ago, but now I'm convinced to invest more energy into it.
Thanks, these videos are extremely helpful.
Happy new year to everyone.

[Atmos]

Moving off React... to NextJS.
The clickbait is real.

[nro]

Definitely a bit of clickbait here, but the message is good and valuable generally, especially for those who have heard of Expo a few years ago but didn't use it due to shortcomings at the time that have sense been overcome.

[antopolskiy]

my team is about to start developing a companion app for our webapp, and we were trying to make a decision between expo and RN. this is extremely timely and helpful, thanks, Theo

[eilmwpt]

Love this. Sucha great summary of all the ways that Expo makes life better. "Work smarter not harder" ya know.

[grimm_gen]

I use expo on personnal projects, and for a one man team Expo is a no brainer. The documentation is good, it has most of the native api you would need, the EAS flow is simple and effective, I love it!

[bideshbanerjee]

In college days I was using a PC with 2 GB ram, with expo I have managed to build mobile apps for my resume projects.
Even today it's surprises me, how the hell it is possible.

[nziranziza]

I don’t get why people think Expo is not React Native

[djimi]

1 month ago I was between flutter and react-native, then I saw a video of yours about react-native and I was shocked
I never heard that before.
You helped me understand why react-native is so powerful, thank you Theo

[arivanhouten]

4:19: I worked with a setup of ionic, capacitor, react and adb before. I quite liked the hot reload provided by adb but it was a pain to set it up each time and the compilation step also took its time. Glad to see that there's another solution besides adb which I will definitely try out.

[alexmachin]

Probably worth mentioning if you change your environment variables often e.g. changing ip address or enabling Storybook it's worth setting up android and xcode locally still so you don't burn through CI/CD minutes 😅

[SandraWantsCoke]

The free tier of expo has very long build times, because you sometimes* have to wait in line. Sometimes means during peak time (work time), it can also take over an hour of waiting in a queue for your build to start building. Average is maybe 20 minutes. That was the free version, so can't complain. There's a paid version though, where you basically don't wait.

[nathanpiper]

One thing that often gets missed with the obsession of web technology driven cross-platform mobile stacks is that companies/devs are trying to “cheat” by not learning the design system of the platform and this often results in a lesser user experience.

Talking from an iOS perspective, you can tell apps that are made with RN and other such frameworks, because the accessibility is usually poor and the UI mixes design systems (e.g. Apple HIG and Material). Also, performance can be an issue.

The argument about being able to write native bindings doesn’t stack up, because then you’ve got more layers/frameworks and languages to understand and debug.

When most user trends are towards native apps being the primary frontend being consumed (vs web apps), why don’t companies/devs just suck it up and make the investment?

[brennan]

Isn't Expo how pretty much everyone builds React Native nowadays? I was confused when you said moving away from React Native because Expo is just improved process around React Native isn't it? It's still RN.

[alextl]

In which cases expo would not be the way to go? When you work with things like hardware sensors and such?

[sheikhabujubayer]

expo is life saver for me . expo-router + nativewind = 🤞

[readingsmash]

Alan has been my health insurance for a few months and have to say, never had a health insurance with such a good iOS app.

[systematicpsychologic]

GREAT video. Okay, you got me, I'm going to try Expo again. Everyone badmouths it as being on the left side of the meme chart, but if a right side exists, I wanna experience it. And you are 100% right about the mac thing, I've had that exact experience.

[ricardotrujillo]

This was already a thing like 4 years ago, still love it!!