[nicoburns]

Getting React Native setup can be a bit of a pain, but I found the transition to M1 completely painless. You just use homebrew for things like Ruby and Cocoapods (the ARM version, but there is no special configuration required - that's what you get by default).

One thing you do generally need to do with React Native is make sure that you're on a relatively recent version of dependencies. If you're revisiting an old project you likely will need to upgrade everything. That probably does make it a bad choice for infrequently maintained projects. Although if you can avoid the native build and stick with what Expo provides then it would become painless again.

[qazxcvbnm]

Mind you, old versions of Expo really aren't something you would like to use if you're getting back to it like right now; Expo's 3-monthly (I think?) release cycle, and their 3 major versions support policy make it quite hard to deal with, for example if you rely on things like Expo Go. If you had an Expo project as recent as Expo 43 and are just maintaining it today, you won't even be able to test it out on Expo Go (on device that is; their old versions of simulator clients are here https://api.expo.dev/v2/versions/latest), support being dropped already.

Especially now is a bad time to claim that Expo makes transitioning painless - Expo is under major transition to their new EAS services (and old Expo updates are going to be dropped permanently in 2 months) and support for the new React Native Architecture is significantly changing their build process.

I would agree that before Expo's recent major changes (which I applaud), upgrades have generally been quite smooth.

Thankfully, the latest Expo versions seem to allow much more flexibility in the build process, making it much more viable for me to do my own Expo builds and stay mostly intact from Expo's support cycles.