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:

Improving Frontend Workflows With In-Browser Database Tools

​​Improving frontend workflows with in-browser database tools

In-browser database tools like RxDB and Neo4j Sandbox help frontend devs manage data, work offline, and streamline tasks with AI support.

Muhammed Ali
Jun 3, 2025 â‹… 7 min read
How To Iterate Over Enums In TypeScript

How to iterate over enums in TypeScript (with code examples)

Learn exactly how to iterate over numeric and string enums in TypeScript, with practical code snippets and type-safe patterns.

Matteo Di Pirro
Jun 2, 2025 â‹… 9 min read
How To Import SVGs Into Your Next.js Apps

How to import SVGs into your Next.js apps: A 2025 guide

Learn the best 2025 methods to import SVGs in Next.js 14+, with tips on performance, styling, and App Router integration.

Joseph Mawa
Jun 2, 2025 â‹… 9 min read
designing llm first products

Designing LLM-first products, not just features

Everyone’s building chat-first AI products. And most of them suck. Here’s how to break the mold and ship LLM-native software that actually solves problems.

Rosario De Chiara
May 30, 2025 â‹… 4 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