Yeah. We have some demos of doing native desktop apps by combining expo web w electron. I’ve heard of a handful of people doing this in production. So it works.
In the long run, we want to target every platform in as native way as we can (Windows, Mac, Linux, web, etc.) but for now, we focus on web, iOS, & Android since those platforms are the biggest and what people ask us for the most.
Make sense! The level of JS rot in the electron ecosystem is exceptionally high, which made me want something like expo, but also the realization that a drop in usage would cause the rot.
Perhaps! Using some flavor Lua as the programming language for browsers would (maybe? 🤷🏼♀️) have been a better choice in some ways and the world might be slightly better off. But JS has a bunch of things that make it work really well for what it does and was close to an optimal choice for its task.
Since we’re stuck w JavaScript, one thing that has been great to see is that the language has evolved and gotten much better over the last few years. And we can keep making it better to fit our needs as we learn better practices (or augment it w things like WASM and TypeScript).
Also, on some level, if it is a mistake, maybe it doesn’t matter much since the end of the line for humanity may be upon us soon as AIs take over and dominate all this stuff.
Yass! I’m becoming a fan. I’m developing on Vercel, Next.JS, TypeScript, React Components, TailwindCSS, and Figma. I’m a web developer at heart, any recommendations on a good deployment tooling mix with the above that includes React Native to Expo?
Cool. A lot of possible answers. Two things I would look at are the new Expo Router and also Solito. A lot of good work in both that I think will feel familiar to you based on the things you are already using.
A big focus of our work recently has been to make this question not even matter anymore.
Ex. You can use any expo module from our SDK in any RN project. Our EAS cloud services now work w any react native project. And you can use things like the Expo Modules API in any RN project.
All that said, if you wanted to make a project be as much like a standard project started w expo-cli, one technique I’ve seen that usually works well, though can be tedious, is to start a new project w expo-cli then copy your source code over and tweak until it works.
Kinda. When I was working on Quora I saw (a) everyone using apps on their phones more and more and more and (b) that it was harder and way more time consuming to make apps compared to building for the web. And I was pretty sure it didn’t have to be that way.
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Ex. You can use any expo module from our SDK in any RN project. Our EAS cloud services now work w any react native project. And you can use things like the Expo Modules API in any RN project.