Why we love React Native and Expo

For years, building a mobile app meant a hard choice: hire a separate team and maintain a separate codebase, or wrap a website in an app shell and call it good. For businesses already invested in modern web tooling, that duplication is expensive and frustrating.

We've leaned on Laravel to keep our web work efficient. For mobile, we've found React Native and Expo are often the right choice. They let us build genuinely native apps using the same language and patterns our web team already writes every day. Here's what we like about them.

From web to native

The biggest draw of React Native for a web-focused team is that it's just JavaScript and TypeScript. The components, hooks, and state management our team writes every day carry over without much friction. The platform is new but the mental model isn't, so web developers tend to ramp up on mobile quickly.

That familiarity carries into the tooling. Expo Router gives you file-based routing on mobile. If you've worked with Next.js or Nuxt, it's the same idea: your file structure defines your navigation. Create a file, get a screen.

For styling, we use Uniwind to bring the Tailwind experience to React Native. Tailwind is already a core part of our web workflow, so styling mobile components feels normal from day one. Same utility classes, same mental model, applied to a native canvas.

Truly native, not a WebView

A common misconception about cross-platform frameworks is that they're just websites in an app wrapper. React Native isn't that. Every component you write maps to a real native UI primitive. A <View> becomes a UIView on iOS and an android.view on Android. You get actual native performance, not an approximation of it.

Expo UI takes this further. It was introduced in SDK 53, and as of SDK 56 the SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose APIs are stable. It lets you use real SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose components directly inside an Expo app.

The idea is that you define a button once and it renders as a native iOS button on Apple devices and a native Android button on Android. Each platform gets the UI it expects, from a single codebase.

What Expo brings

If React Native is the engine, Expo is the framework on top of it. Think of it like Laravel for PHP or Next.js for React. It handles the scaffolding and tooling around your app so you can focus on the product.

Starting with Expo Go

When you create an Expo project, you can scan a QR code and have it running on a real device in minutes. No Xcode, no Android Studio, no Apple Developer account. Expo Go is a sandbox app that hosts your JavaScript bundle, which makes it great for prototyping and early exploration.

Moving to development builds

Expo Go has limits. It can only run native libraries that are already bundled into it, and it doesn't accurately simulate things like push notifications, deep linking, or OAuth flows.

That's when you move to a development build. It's your own custom version of Expo Go, compiled for your app, containing exactly the native code your project needs. For any production-quality app, this is the recommended path. You get the full fidelity of a real device test before you ever submit to a store.

The Expo SDK and custom native code

Expo ships with a large SDK of pre-built native modules covering most things you'd need: camera, location, notifications, file system, sensors, biometrics, and so on. For most apps, you'll never write a line of native code.

When a library doesn't exist for some specific need, the Expo Modules API gives you a way out. You can write Swift and Kotlin and expose those capabilities to JavaScript without leaving the Expo workflow. Your project stays maintainable even when custom native work shows up.

EAS for builds and over-the-air updates

Expo Application Services (EAS) is the cloud layer that makes shipping and maintaining a mobile app a lot less painful. EAS Build automates compiling your app and submitting it to the App Store and Google Play.

EAS Update is the part we lean on most. It lets us push JavaScript changes (bug fixes, copy tweaks, small UI adjustments) directly to users' devices, skipping the app store review queue. For teams used to deploying web changes in seconds, that's a real quality-of-life win.

A healthy open source community

React Native is one of the most widely used cross-platform mobile frameworks in the world, and the open source community around it is active. That means there's a third-party library for almost anything you'd want to do, and the framework itself keeps getting better.

Expo is also open source, and it's become the default way most teams build React Native apps today.

Conclusion

React Native and Expo are a practical answer to a real problem: how do you build native mobile apps without doubling your team or your codebase? You lean on what your web team already knows (JavaScript, TypeScript, Tailwind-style styling, file-based routing) and pair it with a mature framework and a solid deployment platform. The result is mobile work that ships quickly and stays maintainable as it grows.

If you're thinking about a mobile project and want to talk through whether React Native and Expo are the right fit, we'd love to speak with you.