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These are a few things I can say as one of the Expo cofounders. We've worked on the Expo framework for over eight years, and did R&D for a year or two before that even before React Native was released. Many other companies and frameworks, even from very large companies, have come and gone in that time and Expo has endured. Paul Graham wrote he found determination "to be the most important quality in startup founders" for what you find that to be worth. Also from the beginning we believed the Expo framework needs to be free and open source. Introspecting as developers ourselves, we thought people would be a lot more likely to try out and recommend open source frameworks and incrementally build up an ecosystem of modules and StackOverflow answers. Expo gives developers much more agency because it is open source. And it is really hard in my opinion to make a business from licensing developer tools, libraries, and frameworks. There are so many free alternatives. The goal of the Expo framework is to be the ultimate way to build universal, native application software. Universal apps have builds for Android, iOS, the web, and future platforms. And the user experience is truly native to each respective platform, often by using the native system UI components and not a replica. It does take significant effort to maintain the Expo SDK's set of convenient APIs. It's also just one part of Expo overall. Separately, the way we are building a business is by offering hosted services for React Native apps, called Expo Application Services (EAS for short). These are optional services for building and updating your apps and using the Expo framework doesn't require EAS. We find developers often use a combination of EAS for some tasks and their own hardware for others. We work to build developer trust. We are a small company but try to serve developers and our customers well, sometimes better than the companies that have endless trunks of money (we've all seen killedbygoogle.com). So, that's some of how we think about things at Expo. |