So, you want to develop a new website with spiffy apps on Android and iOS, and you want that website and your APIs to run in Node Express. It sounds like a lot of work to write the website in React (or Flutter or whatever the language de jour is), the Android app with Android Studio, and the iOS app with Xcode…
Expo is a platform and framework that allows you to write cross-platform code using React Native, taking advantage of the APIs native to each platform. This makes it extremely simple to develop and deploy apps to a variety of platforms. Additionally, it allows the apps to make use of the native components of whatever platform they are deployed to.
This post first reviews the different features of Expo and how they can be used to rapidly develop and deploy software. Then, we’ll talk through the steps you’ll need to take to get up and running with the tool.
The React Native framework supports an installable mobile application created from JavaScript source code. It is not a React-based web app wrapper. It isn’t a code generator. There is no required application source code in Java, Objective-C, Swift, or Kotlin. Moreover, a single React Native application targets both iOS and Android devices.
In this blog, we show a quick-start that results in an executing application on a phone, within five minutes. That application is live-reloadable, native cross-platform, and written in JavaScript. It is not a web application.
