2021-04-09
2253
#react native
Spencer Carli
41594
Apr 9, 2021 â‹… 8 min read

Building cross-platform apps with Expo instead of React Native

Spencer Carli Spencer is a fullstack developer primarily building cross-platform apps with React Native and teaching others to do the same at React Native School.

Recent posts:

Stagehand and Gemini logos on a gradient background symbolizing AI web automation

How to build a web-based AI agent with Stagehand and Gemini

This guide walks you through creating a web UI for an AI agent that browses, clicks, and extracts info from websites powered by Stagehand and Gemini.

Elijah Asaolu
Jul 4, 2025 â‹… 8 min read
Getting Started With Claude 4 API: A Developer's Walkthrough

Getting started with Claude 4 API: A developer’s walkthrough

This guide explores how to use Anthropic’s Claude 4 models, including Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, to build AI-powered applications.

Andrew Baisden
Jul 3, 2025 â‹… 16 min read
ai dev tool power rankings

AI dev tool power rankings & comparison [July 2025 edition]

Which AI frontend dev tool reigns supreme in July 2025? Check out our power rankings and use our interactive comparison tool to find out.

Chizaram Ken
Jul 2, 2025 â‹… 3 min read
how API client automation can save you hours in development

How API client automation can save you hours in development

Learn how OpenAPI can automate API client generation to save time, reduce bugs, and streamline how your frontend app talks to backend APIs.

Lewis Cianci
Jul 1, 2025 â‹… 7 min read
View all posts

4 Replies to "Building cross-platform apps with Expo instead of React Native"

  1. The only reason I don’t use expo anymore is it’s annoyingly heavy bundle/build size. A typical Hello World app results in a 47MB apk at the very least.

  2. That’s a totally fair criticism – it is heavy. But you have to look at how/why it’s that heavy – it includes nearly _everything_ you may need to build a completely native app using just JavaScript.

    Is the Hello World app heavy? Absolutely. Are you shipping a Hello World app to the app store? Probably not.

    As with anything there are pros and cons. Ease of development comes at some costs.

  3. Hi, you claim that expo is a superset of RN. This is wrong, expo is a subset. Let me proof this with one example: Push Notifications. While you can set up FCM within your bare metal RN App, you can’t do so with Expo. Instead, you have to use Expo’s own push notification service (including their Rest API). So concluding from this Expo can NOT be a superset of a pure RN App. On the other hand, anything you can achieve with Expo you can also achieve with a bare metal RN App. From this we can conclude, that a bare metal RN is at least as powerful as an Expo App and if we introduce the example with FCM then we have a case where a bare metal RN app can do more than Expo, which proofs that expo is a subset of RN

  4. It’s true that you have certain limits when using Expo but you’re getting a lot built into the system vs. having to deal with it yourself. Yes you can’t use FCM or CodePush, but comparable systems are included with Expo.

    Maybe subset wasn’t the best word to use 🙂

Leave a Reply