Actually, I was talking about iOS :) Android is even worse…
I understand why you’re surprised, because I also don’t have issues setting it up on my machine. However, keep in mind that in order to give a class I had to set up 15 machines, some belong to the university (that was easy), some to the students. Ask yourself if you took computers of random 10 people that you meet on the street, would you be able to install RN easily on all 10 of them? Even better, do you think they’d be able to install it themselves? I don’t think so.
As for Expo and create-react-native-app, I totally agree. However, when I was teaching the course I wrote about, create-react-native-app didn’t exist yet and Expo wasn’t that popular. I knew that was a possibility, but I was optimistic that the local dev setup will go well ;)
