What Should Developers Understand About Expo?

Ben ZaneSeptember 14, 2021

3 minutes read

Development teams at a well-known app development firm in Saskatoon recently completed a project for a high-profile client. The app was developed on React Native using the Expo framework. They would like to share their experiences with the Expo framework because they worked on it during their latest project.

The story behind Expo – what is it and why do app development firms use it?

App development professionals explain that Expo is a framework allowing developers to create React Native apps. It provides them with built-in APIs and tools that help make the development process faster and easier.

When firms experimented with Expo, they understood its potential and the value it offered. They also understood its limitations and that is when they decided to try the platform out because of its apparent strong points.

Each professional knows that at some point that they wish to implement push notifications using the Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). This is something Expo does not completely support. Regardless of anything, they do understand they can eject from the usual workflow whenever they need to and whenever any issues arise.

Firms that do not have usable Mac devices often required for iOS React Native development can rely on Expo. It provides a solution to this shortcoming and it will be explained in this post with ease.

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Expo’s development process

The development process of apps using Expo is smooth as the platform provides comprehensive documentation regarding their APIs. This helps streamline the development process. Development teams then reach a point where they wish to implement FCM push notifications and this is where they need to move to the bare workflow process.

At times, development teams encounter obstacles when they come to the bare workflow. Why? Because the app they’re making would crash upon starting up, without many details that could indicate the root cause of the problem.

This issue can take place during the latter stage of app development. Most companies often dream of deploying their apps to their respective platforms’ app stores as early as possible. However, development teams do not know how long it will take to determine what went wrong in terms of the constant crashes that happened.

Instead of wasting time investigating using the wrong techniques, development professionals at the same mobile app development firm in Saskatoon found an alternative way to resolve the issue. The technique they determined allowed them to stay within the managed workflow, reduced time spent on unnecessary research, and brought the time to deploy the completed app to the stores.

The struggles with Apple’s iOS for firms using Expo

Some companies using Expo explain that they struggled in the beginning when using the platform whilst developing iOS apps. One of them (based in Brampton) revealed that after they deployed the Android version of their bike sharing app to Google’s play store (which was approved quickly by Google), they ensured to make full use of Over Air (OTA) updates feature Expo offered.

That very firm revealed issues when they tried deploying an iOS version of their app to Apple’s App Store. The app has a subscription feature for regular bicycle users at reasonable rates. The mechanism the development company made is their own in-house mechanism.

Companies making iOS apps are usually aware of Apple’s policy of providing app users with the In-App Purchase option. Instead what the firm did was do what Spotify did; remove the payment feature in the app and replace it with a web page where they can avail of the payment feature.

Apple did not like this. They kept rejecting these builds that the company provided them and the reasons were vague.

The company considered adding the In-App purchase feature but realized later that the managed workflow they used for app development wasn’t supporting this. Since the firm was hesitant to deal with the side effects of moving to a bare workflow, the development team concealed subscription content from iOS users so Apple can approve them after numerous rejections (hire app developer).