[wesvance]

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 giving it another go - its not the Expo you remember before their custom dev-client days.

[pests]

I haven't used react native in years. Expo at the time felt like a shitty add-on trying to capture some part of the app development process but I didn't feel it added anything.

Sounds like I s gotten a lot better and found an actual usecase. I'll have to check them out again.

[throw14082020]

Yea, felt the same but haven't used react native for years either. Some concrete examples:

- Generally a poorer developer experience (bugs, bad documentation).

- Couldn't use some popular/common react native packages. It needed to be compatible with Expo, and there was an expo specific version to use the camera for example. These would have different (and more) bugs. Trying to use any unsupported packages meant ejecting, a hell that might be similar to ejecting from create react app or using craco, perhaps.

- Wasn't really adding much apart from being "all-in-one", but unfortunately each piece was sub par to the original react native.

- Unfortunately the react native docs were defaulting to suggest using Expo. They still do that now: https://reactnative.dev/docs/environment-setup. And yet developers often eject from Expo, so you'd rewrite the scaffolding of your app without expo instead of ejecting. IMHO that's quite sad to see the React Native docs still suggests Expo.

Side note: I've been using Flutter for a few years now, much better developer experience. Doesn't have code push yet, but https://shorebird.dev/ is working on it. (I am not affiliated with them).

[andrewingram]

Last time I worked with Expo, the main historical reason for ejecting (custom native modules) was all but eliminated by the config plugin system. We actually ejected at one point, but rolled back that change once we realise the plugin system could do everything we needed.

[snordgren]

I love these real takes. I had the exact same experience trying to get into React Native and Expo, eventually just decided to write native apps if I ever get into app dev.

[jameside]

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

[techterrier]

widgets!