Expo

💡 Interesting watch about app store rankings...but also about how to launch a product, process feedback, and make adjustments. Arthur is a one time Expo blog author and a talented engineer who has shifted his attention to a pressing problem: How to make mobile apps rank. He built a tool to help devs create optimal ASO to win on the App Store. In this video he shows how he built this tool, how we launched it, processed feedback, and adjusted the product based on feedback and technical limitations. https://lnkd.in/geYMnJPW

🥑 Most teams don't get to start from scratch. They inherit dependencies, outgrow tools, and watch community packages stop getting maintained. Fig - Food Is Good is a 5-person engineering team building an app that helps millions of people with food allergies and dietary restrictions find safe food. When community packages started breaking on platform updates, they moved to Expo SDK. And when Microsoft retired CodePush, they moved OTA updates Expo. The pattern is simple: fewer things that break means more time building what matters. Here are a couple of the libraries and services they depend on (full detail with code snippets in the blog below from Fig co-founder Jake Lynch): ◆ expo-image replaced react-native-svg for static icons, improving rendering performance ◆ expo-location replaced @react-native-community/geolocation for more granular control ◆ expo-store-review replaced a community library that broke when iOS 18 deprecated its underlying API ◆ EAS Update replaced CodePush for delivering critical JavaScript fixes Fig was also a finalist for an Expo App Award. Here's the full story of their move to Expo and what it changed for their team: https://lnkd.in/gijNUGcq

🙌 It's almost impossible to find a youtube tutorial covering Expo's Services. Until now. There is a massive new React Native crash course from the talented team at JavaScript Mastery. You'll learn how to build with all the shiny new tools in SDK 55. And then you'll learn how to use Expo's Build, Submit, Update, and Workflows services for shipping and maintaining real production apps. https://lnkd.in/grtRVadX

Has anyone else tried HeroUI (YC S24) with Expo? Brian Ortega whipped up this demo the other day and it looks pretty snappy. https://heroui.com/

🤔 The team at Fieldy was skeptical of Expo. Would it add bloat? Slow them down? This is their migration story... "We never really considered Expo before. We had a fear that adding a managed layer on top of our heavy native requirements would introduce bloat." - Adomas Valiukevičius Fieldy builds an AI wearable assistant that relies on persistent Bluetooth connections, background audio transfers, and tight RAM budgets. Their team was protective of performance and skeptical that Expo could keep up. Then they gave it a real shot. Here's what nine months of production use looked like: ◆ Used Expo Atlas to find redundant packages, cut 10% of the JS bundle in a single PR ◆ Removed 18.6MB of bundled fonts that weren't needed (SF Pro is a system font on iOS) ◆ Fixed tree shaking for lodash and date-fns, saving 2MB+ of JS ◆ Wrote their entire BLE layer in native Swift and Kotlin using Expo Modules ◆ Automated deployments with Expo's CICD Workflows: most updates ship in minutes, not days ◆ Stripped x86 architectures via a config plugin, speeding up builds by 40% They also share an honest mistake: an OTA update pushed with the wrong environment variables took down their paywall in production. The fix was moving all releases through Expo's CICD Workflows service so env vars are handled automatically. Great post to read and share if your team has been on the fence about Expo for performance-sensitive apps. Thank you to Adomas for writing and to Tomasz Sapeta for encouraging Fieldy to use Expo! https://lnkd.in/g5q_2UeF

🫣 Be honest: you can build an app now, but can you ship it? The team at Infinite Red, Inc. is getting a lot of "hey can you just help me get this app over the finish line" requests. Which is great. It's fantastic that more and more people are able to get apps close to the finish line. And it's important for everyone to start learning how to finish an app and get it shipped. These are the difficult hours. They aren't to be overlooked. https://lnkd.in/gEGKesGm

🍹 Anyone want to get drinks with us and Sentry in Chicago? We're headed to Deep Dish Swift 2026 next month in Chicago. And we're co-hosting drinks at a tiki bar. No slides will be shown at this meetup! We're just looking to connect with fellow Deep Dish Swifties and our local community of Expo devs in Chicago. https://lnkd.in/gPKqrwD7

The ceiling is so high with Expo + Reanimated. Software Mansion's declarative, performant Reanimated library fundamentally raised the bar for all React Native apps. This example from Nathan Schroeder is a good example of what's possible. https://lnkd.in/gKRFm-dT

😍 There's an exciting new React Native animation library powered by platform APIs. App&Flow recently shipped "React Native Ease" - a fast, simple, lightweight animation library with zero JavaScript overhead that runs entirely on native platform APIs. The team at App&Flow has made a ton of valuable contributions to React Native over the years. They do excellent work. Here's a tutorial video from Alberto Moedano for more details: https://lnkd.in/gGYGDax9