2021-04-09
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#react native
Spencer Carli
41594
Apr 9, 2021 ⋅ 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.

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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 🙂

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