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Create React Native App vs Expo: What are the differences?
Create React Native App and Expo are two popular tools used in mobile app development with React Native. They both aim to simplify the process of building cross-platform mobile applications using React Native. Let's explore the key differences between Create React Native App and Expo.
Configuration and Setup: Create React Native App is a command-line tool that helps set up a new React Native project with minimal configuration. It offers a simple and lightweight approach, giving developers more control over the project setup and dependencies. On the other hand, Expo is a comprehensive development platform that comes with a suite of pre-configured tools and libraries out of the box. It provides a quick and streamlined setup, allowing developers to get started with React Native development without the need to configure multiple dependencies.
Development Workflow: Create React Native App relies on the React Native CLI for building and running the app, making it more suitable for developers who prefer a traditional development workflow. It provides flexibility to add native modules and customize the native code if needed. Expo, on the other hand, offers a managed workflow that abstracts away much of the native development complexities. It allows developers to build and test apps using a web-based development environment, and some features may require using Expo's APIs.
Access to Native Modules: In Create React Native App, developers have direct access to the native code, enabling them to use custom native modules or third-party libraries that might not be available through JavaScript. This gives developers more flexibility and control over the app's capabilities. Expo, on the other hand, comes with a limited set of native modules out of the box. While it provides a wide range of built-in functionalities, developers may face limitations when trying to use certain custom native modules not supported by Expo.
Ejecting: Create React Native App allows developers to "eject" the project, which means moving away from its minimal configuration and exposing the underlying native code. This step is irreversible, but it grants full control over the native modules and build configurations. Expo, on the other hand, doesn't support full ejecting. While it offers the "ExpoKit" option to customize some native modules, developers cannot fully eject and modify every aspect of the native code.
Publishing and Distribution: Expo offers additional benefits for distribution, providing over-the-air (OTA) updates and easy sharing of app builds with stakeholders without going through app stores. Create React Native App requires standard app store deployment for updates and distribution.
In summary, Create React Native App offers more flexibility and control, making it suitable for projects that require extensive customization and native module integration. On the other hand, Expo provides a more streamlined development experience and is an excellent choice for rapidly building and testing apps with a rich set of built-in features and ease of distribution.
Hello guys, I am new here. So, if I posted without specific guidelines, please ignore.
Basically, I am an iOS developer and developing native apps for the last three years. Recently, I started learning React Native to develop apps for both platforms. If anyone out there knows any useful resources that will become a better react native developer.
#newbie
Well, the first resource I would recommend you is my upcoming book by Packt Publishing, "Professional React Native", but it's due late January next year :) . Now jokes aside (the book's real by the way :) ), the easiest way to build a iOS/Android/Web app with React Native is to do: npm install -g expo-cli expo init some-project cd some-project expo eject
You might have heard of Expo, but trust me, stay away from it. Expo highest value is that it's an already pre-configured 3 platforms environment, but if you don't eject then you're vendor-locked to what Expo has to offer in iOS and Android, which is very poor compared to going full React Native on these platforms, they can't even handle Google Sign In properly and by the way, even if your app is 10 lines of code your app size will be over 40 MB if you don't eject, yep it's that bad, plus the performance is regular and the loading times slow, not to mention that you're stuck with their build service which the free tier makes you wait for hours for a free build slot. It's important to note that when ejecting you don't lose the Web, you simply do expo start --web to start your dev environment and expo build:web to build a static website that you can serve with any web server. Regarding state management, don't bother with "lifting state up" philosophies mixed with Context API to manage your state, lifting state is a great pattern and helps your codebase, Context is great to avoid prop-drilling, but NEVER mix them to achieve app-wide state management, for that, simply go for Redux or MobX, the hype is all about Redux, but I consider MobX far better in many aspects. However, as you're getting new into this I would recommend you start with Redux AND PLEASE grab yourself npm install @manaflair/redux-batch so that you can batch updates and don't bring your app to a crawl. Forget that "connect HOC" thing with React-Redux, don't bother for a second with it, go with Hooks and useSelector and useDispatch and the likes, it will make your code SO much cleaner and smaller. Adopt clean and new Hooks philosophy, avoid writing class components as much as possible and write function components augmented with Hooks.
Our stack roughly divides into three major components, the front-end, back-end and the data storage.
For the front-end, we have decided to go with React Native via Expo. This allows us to target both Android and iOS with a single codebase. Expo provides "managed workflows" and an SDK that will simplify development and deployment.
For the back-end, we have decided to use Python. Python is the language of choice for machine learning (ML). It has extensive support for traditional ML algorithms (e.g. random forests) via Scikit-Learn and the SciPy ecosystem. On top of this, our industry partner has provided us their current solution written in Python. We decided to expose the back-end as a REST API using FastAPI. This allows us to nicely separate concerns from the rest of the codebase. FastAPIs use of static type hints, validation with Pydantic, and automated documentation allows us to build better APIs faster.
For data storage we decided to use a MongoDB Atlas, a NoSQL database. We decided to use a NoSQL database because we need to store large amounts of data (e.g data from the wearable IMUs). Moreover, due to the ever changing nature of a startup we require flexibility. NoSQL databases are schema-free which enables us to modify our schema as we see fit.
We plan on using GitHub Actions (GA) to orchestrate our CI/CD. Given GAs broad support of languages and workflows, it's hard to go wrong with this decision. We will also be using GitHub for version control and project management, so having everything in one place is convenient.
The major components of our CI/CD for the backend will consist of black for autoformatting, flake8 for linting, pytest for unit-testing, and mypy for static type checking and codecov for coverage reporting. We plan to use separate Docker containers to package the back-end and front-end components and use Docker Compose to launch the app. This allows us to better separate concerns, manage dependencies, and ensure our app is deployable anywhere.
Pros of Create React Native App
Pros of Expo
- Free15
- Hot Reload13
- Easy to learn9
- Common ios and android app setup9
- Open Source6
- Streamlined6
- Builds into a React Native app5
- PWA supported2
- Plugins for web use with Next.js1
