Awesome Expo Apps for React Native

Published in

BlechaTech

2 min readAug 13, 2017

I’ve been working through creating an app that I need for my kids baseball activities during the past month and I’ve been really impressed with the toolset that the Expo team has put together. Given this is a side project, I have to be the most effective in the least amount of time possible. To that end, I’m typically looking for this set of features these days:

Easy to ship to test users (aka my wife & kids). It’s much nicer for me if this doesn’t have to go through the app store for development and testing purposes.

JavaScript tool set — I’ve decided to use JavaScript as my primary language for the next bit unless there’s a specific reason not to use it.

React — I’m spending most of my front end development in react these days, and I’m very happy about it. The mental model is fairly straightforward and translates from web to mobile easily.

Background

create_react_native_app gives you an expo app by default. You have the option of ejecting if you need to link in a native library, but you can get pretty far without having to eject. If you download the XDE development tool, you have a simple publishing workflow for internal (aka you share a lan connection with your users) and a good workflow for external (you can publish up to expo for users that aren’t on your lan).

Check out the expo explanation video:

I decided I wanted to keep track of the expo apps I’m seeing in publish and the added bonus that they’re typically linked with a github account. The first two are (authors and notes are cited in the github repo, link below):