using Expo for the first time

i started my programming journey with the goal of becoming a web developer and i don’t regret it, especially after trying Expo

installation

i followed React Native’s Set Up Your Environment guide. i ran out of storage while installing Android Studio, which is not a pleasant experience on Linux. although this is not React Native’s problem, the frustration inevitably influenced my attitude towards it. the first real problem came with Watchman: none of the installation options worked for my Debian system. Building from source gave a lot of errors, Prebuilt binaries for Ubuntu expectedly didn’t work, just like Prebuilt Debs for Ubuntu. i only managed to install a very old version via sudo apt install watchman, and i’m not sure that it even works

Expo

npx create-expo-app worked smoothly, unlike Expo Go (mobile app for Expo): sometimes it started showing a white blank screen; the only solution i found was restarting the phone, though clearing the app data also worked a few times

Android emulator

after having problems with Expo Go, i decided to give Android emulator a go. my PC with the latest Debian, AMD Ryzen 5 1600 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 (if it even uses GPU) couldn’t handle the latest Android version; only Android 9 (the only other version i’ve tried) worked fine. still, hot reloading frequently failed in both Expo Go and Android emulator. subsequently, i encountered issues with a non-working dark mode, for which i’ve yet to find a solution. maybe the problem is with the age of Android 9

another inconvenience is the inability to fixate the Android emulator window on one side of the screen. this makes scrolling with cursor near the corner impossible in VSCode, for example

expo-router

customizing the styles is unnecessarily complex and docs are not helpful in my opinion. the router itself is also a bit odd

while researching for this blog post i found out there’s an unstyled version of expo-router. this would be helpful to me, but the naming is very confusing: why is the headless version called <name> UI? i would’ve never guessed

development builds

after getting tired of problems with Expo Go and Android emulator, i decided to see if expo-dev-client can fix them. scanning the QR code just closed the camera view and did nothing

Kotlin

development builds and some more problems with loading the app pissed me off so i decided to try Kotlin. it suits me as i’m developing my app only for Android and the only reason i chose React Native at first is because i’m familiar with React. mirroring the phone screen in Android Studio works flawlessly and the language seems quite elegant, like a mix of Java and Go. i’m just learning the basics but the experience for now is much more positive than with Expo. i’ll write a follow-up blog post later about my Kotlin experience

conclusion

the State of React Native survey indicates that developers are generally happy about developing React Native apps, especially with Expo. at the same time, all of the mentioned errors and bugs i experienced are undocumented (at least i haven’t found any solution after spending quite a lot of time on Google), am i the only one experiencing them? perhaps i’m an exception, and Expo is actually quite good. i’d be glad to hear about your experience with Expo

Command '['/usr/bin/cmake', '--build', '/tmp/fbcode_builder_getdeps-ZhomeZsinskiyZwatchmanZbuildZfbcode_builder/build/folly', '--target', 'install', '--config', 'RelWithDebInfo', '-j', '8']' returned non-zero exit status 1.