Moving Off React Native
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- čas přidán 1. 01. 2024
- Huge shoutout to Alan for making such a bold move and also sharing it with us all. Expo has made a great set of tools, really cool to see them working as intended
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S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏 - Věda a technologie
Why are we acting like expo is not react native?
I'm a 36 year old Hardware Engineer with a lot of PCB design and robotics experience, in October I decided to start learning software development: JS, at first now looking into React, React Native, I came across expo a few weeks ago, but now I'm convinced to invest more energy into it.
Thanks, these videos are extremely helpful.
Happy new year to everyone.
dont do it
Don't do it, native is total mess, even bigger than react itself.
You are lucky to reach this channel so early on in your new career!
@@RaZziaN1i think it's more healthy if u have a point why it is a total mess.
@@RaZziaN1most of what made working in react native a total mess is alleviated with expo. The dx is one of the best I’ve used. Watch your requests in the chrome debugger just like you would in a web app, live debugging integration in vs code, easy builds via EAS. If you are going green field mobile it’s a no brainer imo.
Moving off React... to NextJS.
The clickbait is real.
I use expo on personnal projects, and for a one man team Expo is a no brainer. The documentation is good, it has most of the native api you would need, the EAS flow is simple and effective, I love it!
Definitely a bit of clickbait here, but the message is good and valuable generally, especially for those who have heard of Expo a few years ago but didn't use it due to shortcomings at the time that have sense been overcome.
Classic theo and his crazy ass thumbnail as always lmao. Honestly he made me hate him day by day
Yeah. His ridiculous faces in the thumbnails and click-bait titles are getting real old. I unsubbed a while ago because it was too much, resubbed recently and but he's still at it. :/
It's the name of the game. For me (and I know this is not a good criticism), but I'm not a huge fan his narration style. Too perfect...
Yeah, that's Theo
@@PrinzEugen39 It's dumb for subscribers, but it 100% works to bait newcomers.
In college days I was using a PC with 2 GB ram, with expo I have managed to build mobile apps for my resume projects.
Even today it's surprises me, how the hell it is possible.
Wow 2gb, it's impressive you made that work
In my college days I used a PC with 640k of RAM. I had a copy of Windows 1, but couldn't use it... it required 1 MG. =)
Love this. Sucha great summary of all the ways that Expo makes life better. "Work smarter not harder" ya know.
my team is about to start developing a companion app for our webapp, and we were trying to make a decision between expo and RN. this is extremely timely and helpful, thanks, Theo
The use of Expo is beneficial, but when you need to work with native code, such as compressing a video with FFmpeg, you'll need pure React Native because Expo doesn't support FFmpeg. What you should do is use both together (Expo and React Native). Another example involves push notifications in the background, for which you'll need pure React Native to handle them, as even stated on their website.
@@bulljimmy2056 Expo has allowed native plugins to run, the same way React Native allows them, for a few years now. 99% of the native things you need have been custom-built by Expo, but if you need something more, you can still use 3rd party native plugins from npm, which wasn't the case a few years ago.
My team is also going to write the code for a product....I am still not sure what to choose
@@pranjalkesarwani9993 we eventually went with expo setup, and we already have the first version on app store. worked pretty well for our case
1 month ago I was between flutter and react-native, then I saw a video of yours about react-native and I was shocked
I never heard that before.
You helped me understand why react-native is so powerful, thank you Theo
a while ago there was an app being developed in my workplace, the external consultant used flutter, it went so bad that I had to learn how to use flutter in general in 2 hours and help him try to solve it, flutter is the worst, riddled with problems, slow, etc, at least compared with the few apps I have done as test in react and kotlin. Take in mind I am not a front end developer.
Which video was that one?
@@gregorydaggett7444
React Natives Secret Superpower
I am in the same situtation and I was blown away by Expo capacity, which video were you talking about?
ya djamal yhdik rabi
Probably worth mentioning if you change your environment variables often e.g. changing ip address or enabling Storybook it's worth setting up android and xcode locally still so you don't burn through CI/CD minutes 😅
expo is life saver for me . expo-router + nativewind = 🤞
you mean nativewind v4? their v2 isn't as good.
expo router is actually a shithole and terrible DX, it gives more problems than value, plain navigation is still much better especially for bigger apps the way how they have planned expo router was so idiotic... I was hyped aswell, but after 2 mobile projects I decided that I will never use this shit ever since it has terrible DX and low productivity.
@@JEsterCW It used to suck as well, now it is ok, I use it just for the basic building blocks and the app i'm building doesn't have a lot of weird requirements of navigation so it is ok.
@@pencilcheck for simple apps with basic its good, but for anything else that past 5+ views with dynamic routes etc its hell no
@@JEsterCWSo what do you recommend for those that has your use case?
The clickbait really lets down what is otherwise a great channel.
As someone who was preparing to migrate to native cli from expo(because of people claiming it's not production ready) you definitely did save me a ton of time and energy. Thanks Theo!
I don’t get why people think Expo is not React Native
One thing that often gets missed with the obsession of web technology driven cross-platform mobile stacks is that companies/devs are trying to “cheat” by not learning the design system of the platform and this often results in a lesser user experience.
Talking from an iOS perspective, you can tell apps that are made with RN and other such frameworks, because the accessibility is usually poor and the UI mixes design systems (e.g. Apple HIG and Material). Also, performance can be an issue.
The argument about being able to write native bindings doesn’t stack up, because then you’ve got more layers/frameworks and languages to understand and debug.
When most user trends are towards native apps being the primary frontend being consumed (vs web apps), why don’t companies/devs just suck it up and make the investment?
The free tier of expo has very long build times, because you sometimes* have to wait in line. Sometimes means during peak time (work time), it can also take over an hour of waiting in a queue for your build to start building. Average is maybe 20 minutes. That was the free version, so can't complain. There's a paid version though, where you basically don't wait.
4:19: I worked with a setup of ionic, capacitor, react and adb before. I quite liked the hot reload provided by adb but it was a pain to set it up each time and the compilation step also took its time. Glad to see that there's another solution besides adb which I will definitely try out.
I love your videos man, but this "sorry I know I baited you" is becoming a bit too common. If you bait me into watching the videos I don't feel like watching, I won't click on the videos I might want to watch thinking it'll be a bait anyway
Hey there! I'm a civil engineer who would love to build a passion project app/website. Is this something that you'd recommend I try and use to develop for mobile? It seems like it could be a very useful tool, but I don't want to start too deep in the weeds when I still am learning fullstack web development. Thanks
Alan has been my health insurance for a few months and have to say, never had a health insurance with such a good iOS app.
Thanks for the kind words!
(I'm the author of the article Theo's talking about in the video.)
In which cases expo would not be the way to go? When you work with things like hardware sensors and such?
Most interesting video so far. Clearly explained for someone that never experienced mobile development.
This was already a thing like 4 years ago, still love it!!
GREAT video. Okay, you got me, I'm going to try Expo again. Everyone badmouths it as being on the left side of the meme chart, but if a right side exists, I wanna experience it. And you are 100% right about the mac thing, I've had that exact experience.
We are also moving from a bare React Native app to Expo for our app. The main pain point with bare React Native is updates; not to React Native itself, that's the easy part, but rather for iOS and Android, whenever they change their distribution and build tools. We end up using the same tools you'd use for native development anyway (Fastlane, Gradle, Maven, CocoaPods, etc.) and it's a hassle.
My hope is that Expo will do away we a lot of this, though I don't know whether we'll be using EAS but it could help us provide faster minor updates to users without having to go through the entire review process that doesn't fit our release cycle.
Hi, will u guys use the new expo router ? And what will u do if you need some background operations on the phone?
If your app doesn't require native code then Expo should indeed definitely be the choice. I've spent months updating a react native app from 0.62 to latest. Expo would've made the process so much easier, but the app requires native code so we had to eject from Expo early on.
@@blazi_0 We haven't determined that yet. We are currently using React Navigation. The only "background operations" we need is handled through push notifications and bluetooth connection. These will automatically keep the app active in the background to sync when needed.
@@dnserror89 It does require some native code, especially for iOS widgets and live activities.
The native parts can be integrated with expo-config-plugins, so I don't worry about ejecting. This is the major reason we are moving to Expo now.
If you aren't building on EAS on the cloud, then not sure Expo will alleviate the issues of Android/iOS Upgrading their build tools, since you'd more or less be building locally anyway.
Keep making videos like this. It's helps a lot.
am i need to fully understand react native first to understand expo? like... if i want use next js i must understand react js first right
Question.
Can Expo let you run local databases on React Native such as RealmDB?
I tried making a mobile app with Expo once and I found out I could not add RealmDB into it so I switched to normal React Native.
Yes, you'd need to use custom dev client and config plugins
@@XavierSeignard thank you 😊
I just got an expo project to update some dependencies and modify some parts of it and seems really cool
Those like and sub callouts are so smooth
We use Expo in our video sharing app. Combined with Nativewind (Tailwindcss for React Native), the developer experience has been quite a positive one. My main criticism of React Native is that it is not PNPM friendly. It is making migrating to a PNPM monorepo a hassle.
It was a minor hassle but disabling package hoisting in pnpm and applying monorepo tips from expo docs did the trick.
With Expo 50 and RN 0.73 it should get even better as it will ship the new Metro version that now supports following symlinks so no need to disable hoisting anymore.
Would be great to make a video about these cool feature in details.
what do you think about flutterflow ?
I like the headline, it set a lot of people's asses on fire. The folks were hoping the video would be about how they moved to Flutter or Native LOL
Suggestion: experiment with - and then make a video about Capacitor.
I switched from an expo project to a react native project and i dread working on it now. Now i am thinking about switching again.
There are issues with expo I have faced, primarily with integrations. Sentry for example does not work with expo (specifically expo-router). Some SSO libraries do not work with expo go. Its a good workflow for development but still needs some improvements in integrations side of things.
When I first wanted to make a mobile app, I kept searching "react-native vs flutter" only to get these bland "the one you go with depends on your specific needs" videos. Theo, because he is not afraid to offend people and serve hot takes, has an informative react-native vs flutter video, which was much more useful than other bland SEO this-vs-that content. The Hooks/JSX style of rendering is exactly the same in react-native as it is in react. Libraries liker react-query and jotai for state management work in both react and react-native.
What would you prefer if you already know react and want to explore app development..
React native or flutter
@@raghavendra3422i have been developing with react for quite a while. I am using react native because similar state management and api integration libraries + logic can be implemented.
I haven't explored flutter yet, probably not until our company or a client requires us to.
I'd say if you already know react, just go for react-native 😅
@@somedude6420 oh. Thankyou
@@raghavendra3422 Flutter feels like a framework made for Android devs who want to make their apps cross-platform. Flutter makes easy things cumbersome, but at least makes the hard things possible. Making complex animations in Flutter (which would be 5 lines of code in CSS) is a PITA, not to mention the state management mess. Also why are "stateful" and "stateless" widgets 2 completely different things??
Expo makes the easy things easy, and the hard things also easy. I personally see the winner.
Is there a way to force android light mode on xiaomi devices with expo? I couldn't find a way. The dark mode fucks all of the colors of the app, things that SHOULD be white turn into gray
Is this an ad for Expo?
Isn't Expo how pretty much everyone builds React Native nowadays? I was confused when you said moving away from React Native because Expo is just improved process around React Native isn't it? It's still RN.
I'd love to see expo support react-native-windows both so I could get into it and also to give other developers/teams a good alternative to just shipping electron for desktop apps.
Yes, that will become a game changer. I developed a UWP using react native. I had to improvide in cases where no packages existed for my use case
So it's still React Native, just in a fancy suit!
Yeah expo is very easy and cool, but it didn't work well with my last project where I needed spme background operations on the phone, especially i was using expo router it didn't work no matter what i did. Also the background fetch and task manager is not great, sometimes it just stops working or stops when u terminate the app etc.. not great at all
Expo looks good! I would go with it if I wanna keep it all in JS, but if we're really thinking about the dev experience with hybrid to native efficiently, I think Flutter sounds like the right choice here.
What fonts is this guy using? They look so good.
I honestly though this was a basic react development workflow, the best info I saw always used it, I also had some problems with it regarding versions of expo go vs expo in my pc, but they are minor, although I hope they have solved it. I am not a front end developer, I just do those things for fun sometimes so I don't interact with front end development too much.
Great video. Classic Theo clickbait title and switcheroo. Thanks for making this.
It's quite frustrating; I prefer building apps directly using native iOS and Android code, creating two separate codebases, and avoiding tools like React Native and Expo. There are constant issues and updates required when using these tools, which can be a significant headache. You end up spending a substantial amount of your time fixing bugs and making updates rather than focusing on developing new features.
Can anyone help me understand the difference between using expo vs expo bare? In the latter case are you forgoing the ability to create expo dev clients?
Downvote for clickbait
this is top tier bait lol. 😂
Moving Off React Native - to React Native.. with some boilerplate.. should be the title
Why does Theo think he’s some high profile tech journalist
I am currently the solo mobile developer of a react native app, inherited from a previous client with 0 knowledge transfer, coming form a web development background and 2018 react native familiarity. The development experience on iOS is a huge pain since i need to run it on physical devices, no hot reload, re-packaging the app breaks the build phases and i have to reset manually, and so on.
A lot of time is wasted just running / building / rebuilding the app, not to mention how hard white labeling for other clients make it.
I know it can be worse too, so i am looking for a solution to save me time in building, re-packaging the assets and configs (partially done manually), and this video has been helpful in providing ideas on how to approach this.
I wish i can eventually move the app to expo, and use OTA for the many app assets, but it's hard to balance it with releasing new features since i am working solo with other project responsibilities, the stakeholders don't care about this unfortunately.
Also did you know about Nativewind? tailwind css integration for react native, for me this is the best way to build apps
Soo, no developer account is required for iOS?
The big reason we use expo is over the air updates. It basically means your users dont need to update their applications for anything other than big releases. New assets or code gets downloaded when the application starts.
OTA can be done with RN too
How does Expo compared to Appflow?
Local builds work great for me when i need it. Expo updates for the everything else.
Tricked by the title 😂
Nice to see a French company featured. Expo is great 👌
Coucou Sébastien 👋
@@XavierSeignard 😄 coucou
I looked at React Native and Expo for a work project where we needed to use Bluetooth Classic (not ble). For the use case we had, and although there was a community package for this in Expo, we ended up developping the plugin ourselves using Capacitor (the API is, IMO, more straightforward). If there ever is an Expo bluetooth classic plugin (apparently planned, but no ETA), we may consider Expo because of all the features in the video
I wish Rails/Hotwire had an Expo
A drawback is that to build the APK, we need to rely on the Expo servers for Windows since there is no native support for building APKs on this platform.
Actually expo you great freedom to use eas servers or just generate an apk by using gradlew simply from the android folder, but you need to eject the App.
Flutter doesn't use some wired abstraction
It uses skia which Chrome and Firefox use to render
and in Flutter we can use native APIs through packages and if it is not available we can write one
and use it in our project
I think that Dart is better than JavaScript
Unless you're a go to react developer, yes.
I've had to deal with so much shit because the pipelines for our react native app keeps failing for every minor little thing. Just today, as you mentioned, gradle fucked up the pipeline because of some weird caching and it took me all day to fix it.. I think I'm gonna bring up expo in our next sprint review because I rather spend time building apps than debugging builds
i used to do React Native with Expo, so it was not React Native OR Expo , but React Native WITH Expo
expo Is like making a pact with the devil (as a +5 years rn developer)
expo used to suck, I think they turn it around and is feeling a lot better now.
@@pencilchecknothing takes it away from my mind that is just a massive lock-in. Yeah if you wanna ship slightly faster for a small/medium sized app then why not. Remember everything that you put on a software will have it's tradeoffs
@@hackerhaze if you have unlimited amount of money and can hire unlimited amount of talent with unlimited amount of time to interview, then go with whatever you propose. In the real world, you don't have any luxury, even in a big company. The vendor lockin isn't an issue, as everything expo can do, someone else will find it and replace it similar to how react and nextjs has many competitors after they win. Expo is the winner right now, and most of developers will drift very quickly to the next "similar" things very soon in a couple years anyway.
I'm on a team that is investigating expo for a new app at our company. It's not that well implemented to be honest. If you want to use exactly the set up they imagined (and trust them with all credentials and all that) it might be easy and great. But if you don't it's quite mediocre and bunch of use cases are not ironed out or a priority for expo team (like building the app locally, we want to use our own CI; they want us to pay $1k/month). Great product, but not an answer to all.
I completely disagree with your comment.
We have zero troubles building the app locally and use our own CI
(I'm the author of the article Theo's talking about.)
@@XavierSeignard I'm not saying it's impossible to use your own CI, just that it's not a priority for a team nor that those cases are ironed out. To give you more specific example, try to use a private npm repo with your own local expo CLI. It's much more complicated than it should be.
@@XavierSeignardhave you found any performance degradation since moving to expo?
@@poaches8714 we monitor closely various perf metrics (TTI, long renders, freezes and so on) with datadog and home made integration and we haven't noticed any degradations 😌
me debugging my react native code while watching this video.... crying in the corner...
Clickbait 😐
I'd love if you could talk about Capacitor and its tradeoffs (as it is the easiest mobile solution)
Doesn't get as much love as it's further from native.
I've built Cordova apps, Capacitor, Expo. Capacitor has some drawbacks and limitations. But if you don't bump into those it's a no-brainer IMHO. Having one code base to hit web and mobile is very very sweet.
I don't know where Expo is now. When I was building stuff with it, it was really rough. Every version update was a crapshoot if we would need to spend 1-2 weeks of dev time updating our app to be compatible with the latest expo. Lots of bugs in the expo layer as well as the native bridge that were rough to track down.
Then there were javascript bugs that would work properly in the debugger and fail in the actual app. Yuck.
We spent half our dev time fighting with the platform rather than building features.
@@brandonmansfield6570 Makes sense! What are the main drawbacks/limitations from Capacitor in your POV?
@@phemartin
Input for one, browser views need to delay sending the touch event a bit to see if there is some kind of scroll or other gesture going on instead. If you want your input to be really low latency, you can't do this via the browser by over-riding this behavior (or at least I haven't found a way) . This is fairly noticeable if you put a browser next to a very low latency app and run them both watching closely for button actuation time.
Mostly people don't notice though, actual browsers have the same latency built in and for the most part it's "fine". You probably haven't noticed, until I point this out and maybe you look for it, and it may become something you can't unsee.
Some of the plugins for native API features are old and don't work, don't even exist, or don't support the feature you want. So you have to write or update them yourself. Sometimes this is so labor intensive, or limitations make it impossible to do, and the feature becomes a deal killer for the direction.
In my experience, the app can usually totally exist as a capacitor app if you're willing to drop the features in the areas where you run up against such platform limitations. If you don't have much, if any, native API capability, then you are very unlikely to hit a deal breaking limitation.
I've had a thousand years of problems with these high-level frameworks...if I could go back in time, I would use Swift, with Expo a close second. Iteration time is the killer on mobile projects - if you have hot reload you're happy.
I have never used React Native and had to make a small update to a 4 year old app ( yes it should have been updated along the way ) but it was nearly impossible to compile.
Mac had switched from x86 to ARM meaning that Node, Python, Ruby, and Xcode were all unhappy about it.
It sucked, maybe this is the perfect use case for Docker.
Expo isn't just based on react native?
Flutter has a mssive ecosystem of libs and plugins for exactly this purpose as well, so some of the statements here are completely incorrect. Also hot reload in flutter build tools is exactly the same as shown here for expo, works on you mobile phones directly plus it always worked from the beginning of flutter, even when you have a lot of plugins that tap into native code... so not sure how are any of these statements correct. Cool that expo also supports all of this for react native, not sure if I am correct here but it looks like they've were inspired by flutter in many cases from what I can see shown here
expo is now not free now. for build and adding native modules you to recreate build and also not fit for larger apps
I’m moving ON to react native. Expo has never been better.
Expo/RN are great, if you aren't building anything more complicated than what is basically just a web view. The second you need to use something outside of the ecosystem it tears you a new one. I remember spending hours trying to get the android "share to" menu to include my expo app, and ended up just using flutter and got it working in 10 minutes, because having to use dart was less of a headache than figuring out how to get all the native stuff figured out.
Right tool for the rifht problem.
This is just plain wrong. I have built multiple apps using react native that are much more than 'basically just a web view'. Just because limitations exist on certain use cases does not mean that react native is not a capable tool for building complex applications.
Good luck learning bloc, provider and other flutter specific knowledge when you already have all these under your belt from react.
I'm still doing the old way without the expo, I might migrate someday once I can convince the company the expo is a secured environment where configuration and keys cannot be hack.
Thank you, Theo, for the value you are providing. I have particularly connected with this video because it describes my current experience. I created and am currently maintaining a React Native project. Back in 2021, when I started the project, I had to eject from Expo because of the many native dependencies, especially WebRTC. However, three months ago, I started a new project and was surprised by the huge improvement that Expo made. It's almost like you have no reason not to use Expo anymore. I'm planning to migrate our old project away from the native deployment pain. I do think, though, they need to improve their documentation. I feel it's not optimally organized to sell the great value they provide.
Please continue using this style of thumbnails. I love them. But also, mix it up differently when necessary.
Oh no he's selling me!!
Nix works on the Mac. I don't know how well it works together with xcode, though.
Nice Video, interesting topic..
Crying inside when people still mention "eject" as a reason against Expo in 2024 🥲
The main drawback for me is that you have vendor lockin. So when expo goes bankrupt I have to rewrite again, right?
As Expo's open source, I don't see vendor lock-in 🤔
Only EAS part would create vendor lock-in
(I'm the author of the article Theo's talking about)
@@XavierSeignard great work and read the full article. Thanks for the documenting it.
Does anyone know the name of the browser Theo is using here?
Arc browser
Is Bluetooth works with Expo?
4:30
Bluetooth Low Energy is actually quite easy
czcams.com/video/UuHLPsjp6fM/video.htmlsi=c85Nxh0GrumS14Ur
16:59 Nix works on macOS
Edit: No clue how well it works as a replacement for Xcode though. Doubt you could use it to fully replace Xcode for sure.
The fact that expo just doesn't work on React Native Windows makes RNW incredibly hard to vouch for. I worked for nearly 2 years developing a RNW app and even though I mostly got there, by the end it was so frustrating to fix bugs and try and get features to work that I got completely mentally blocked and just couldn't keep going. I stopped working for the company due to a takeover that ended in me being seen as disposable, but even if that hadn't happened, I couldn't have gone on for much longer due to the huge guilt I felt over being mentally blocked and having development happening at a crawling pace. Either they wouldn't have tolerated much more of my pace or I would've resigned since I couldn't in good faith keep getting paid to just be blocked.
I don't see you touching on RNW that much, which is understandable, but I think RNW either needs more love from the community, or it needs to die altogether.
Oh this is cool I'll use it to dick around with a side project. Still in love with native iOS though
I've had to use gradle for both native android stuff at school and flutter professionally. If I never have to deal with its bullshit again, it is a huge win.
I feel u bro
React native will always fall behind Flutter, in the grand scheme of things, the end user is more concerned with UX rather than a button that isn't some abstraction of the component.
Industry prefers react native
I love react with it pros and cons but react native is not it, both expo and react native are just full of bugs.
Having problems with something as basic as npm install is mind bending to me, while working on an expo application I used a package which required me to use yarn install (react native map) and the development went on and package required me to use npm install(react native toast) to run smoothly like how, since when did we have problems like this.
In conclusion after using expo and react native for 3 years professionally nothing just work, and you have to spend time debugging even the framework to understand why things are not working and sometimes even though you know there is nothing you can do.
I'm using react-native and expo professionally for 6 years, and I now have zero problems with it
(I'm the author of the article Theo's talking about)
@@XavierSeignard is it meant to be this hard , I have never seen a package on npm installed it and follow it guide and it just works. The usual process is it breaks everything I spend 2 - 4 hours fixing the issue created from it, and I don't want to even start with animations.
what's that browser?
expo the GOAT!
I hope Nativescripts gets more attention aswell!
RN is moving forward, slowly, but moving. Yet expo always lags behind RN in providing you new fresh features that are essential to build modern fast apps that save your storage and battery.
Most painful thing about RN was developer experience especially for these last 4 years. Now it looks like finally moving to better side. Expo is good for app you need to build for business.
"developer experience that like no one's come close to" in the reference to hot reload over wifi: Xamarin was able to do it 5 years ago czcams.com/video/GoGgIBDXyTc/video.html
Nowadays MAUI (Xamarin's successor) is able to do it in a similar way that was shown in this Theo's video.