Practitioner pattern · Charlie Cheever (Co-founder and CEO of Expo, the React Native framework and cloud services he recommends)
Replace separate iOS and Android apps with one React Native codebase
Expo CEO says teams ship faster and hire more easily; no numbers
Workedteam-processfeature-development
What they did
Many Expo customers had working, well-reviewed Swift/Objective-C iOS apps and Java/Kotlin Android apps but could not add features fast enough, struggled to keep platforms in sync, struggled to hire specialists, and were at risk if their one Android or iOS developer left. They rewrote into one React codebase, staffed it from the same pool as web developers, and got web-style instant reloads instead of recompiling. They drop into native Swift/Kotlin modules only where needed.
What happened
Teams move faster than on either platform alone and one team covers all products.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Building Apps Faster: How AI and React Native are Changing the Game – Charlie Cheever, Expo“A lot of the companies that we talk to that are using Expo, they they even had like working iOS apps that were well reviewed, perfectly fine”
“And so you you can take your the same pool of people that you'd be hiring your website team from and put them all on a you know, sort of application team, and they can work on all products all at once.”
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- Bluesky: Have one developer build iOS, Android and web apps from one codebaseFirst version shipped in 4 months; about 3 people still run the app
- Expo: Give the framework away free and charge for cloud builds and hostingCloud builds are one of the main revenue sources; no numbers
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