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Expo has an impressive team and investor backing However, making your apps depend on a framework has the following dangers: - the framework might stop being m

Expo has an impressive team and investor backing However, making your apps depend on a framework has the following dangers: - the framework might stop being maintained - the vc-backed framework might need to become monetized beyond your means At the end of the day, all these frameworks offer are convenience APIs to easily integrate with native things like push notifications or social sign-ins However, even when these work, they will force you to do things their way, and you won't be able to fully customize your app Learning how to do these things natively in iOS and Android requires extra effort but pays off in the long term. Using frameworks, the time saved in the beginning of your app development journey will be greatly offset by the extra time required to do things like editing framework output in each build towards the end of your journey

jameside 3y ago
These are a few things I can say as one of the Expo cofounders. We've worked on the Expo framework for over eight years, and did R&D for a year or two before that even before React Native was released. Many other companies and frameworks, even from very large companies, have come and gone in that time and Expo has endured. Paul Graham wrote he found determination "to be the most important quality in startup founders" for what you find that to be worth. Also from the beginning we believed the Expo framework needs to be free and open source. Introspecting as developers ourselves, we thought people would be a lot more likely to try out and recommend open source frameworks and incrementally build up an ecosystem of modules and StackOverflow answers. Expo gives developers much more agency because it is open source. And it is really hard in my opinion to make a business from licensing developer tools, libraries, and frameworks. There are so many free alternatives. The goal of the Expo framework is to be the ultimate way to build universal, native application software. Universal apps have builds for Android, iOS, the web, and future platforms. And the user experience is truly native to each respective platform, often by using the native system UI components and not a replica. It does take significant effort to maintain the Expo SDK's set of convenient APIs. It's also just one part of Expo overall. Separately, the way we are building a business is by offering hosted services for React Native apps, called Expo Application Services (EAS for short). These are optional services for building and updating your apps and using the Expo framework doesn't require EAS. We find developers often use a combination of EAS for some tasks and their own hardware for others. We work to build developer trust. We are a small company but try to serve developers and our customers well, sometimes better than the companies that have endless trunks of money (we've all seen killedbygoogle.com). So, that's some of how we think about things at Expo.
- collaborative 3y ago
  ...and I of course wish you every bit of success. The root cause of many problems is Android and iOS specs changing every 6 months in a not backwards compatible way. It makes maintaining any framework an even bigger headache. I hope you have the determination to keep your level of support high enough to overcome this

jameside 3y ago

These are a few things I can say as one of the Expo cofounders. We've worked on the Expo framework for over eight years, and did R&D for a year or two before that even before React Native was released. Many other companies and frameworks, even from very large companies, have come and gone in that time and Expo has endured. Paul Graham wrote he found determination "to be the most important quality in startup founders" for what you find that to be worth. Also from the beginning we believed the Expo framework needs to be free and open source. Introspecting as developers ourselves, we thought people would be a lot more likely to try out and recommend open source frameworks and incrementally build up an ecosystem of modules and StackOverflow answers. Expo gives developers much more agency because it is open source. And it is really hard in my opinion to make a business from licensing developer tools, libraries, and frameworks. There are so many free alternatives. The goal of the Expo framework is to be the ultimate way to build universal, native application software. Universal apps have builds for Android, iOS, the web, and future platforms. And the user experience is truly native to each respective platform, often by using the native system UI components and not a replica. It does take significant effort to maintain the Expo SDK's set of convenient APIs. It's also just one part of Expo overall. Separately, the way we are building a business is by offering hosted services for React Native apps, called Expo Application Services (EAS for short). These are optional services for building and updating your apps and using the Expo framework doesn't require EAS. We find developers often use a combination of EAS for some tasks and their own hardware for others. We work to build developer trust. We are a small company but try to serve developers and our customers well, sometimes better than the companies that have endless trunks of money (we've all seen killedbygoogle.com). So, that's some of how we think about things at Expo.

collaborative 3y ago
...and I of course wish you every bit of success. The root cause of many problems is Android and iOS specs changing every 6 months in a not backwards compatible way. It makes maintaining any framework an even bigger headache. I hope you have the determination to keep your level of support high enough to overcome this