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The Struggles of React Native Devs
If you have been working with react-native/expo for a few years, you should know how the whole mobile application development has changed over the last few years. One of the main downsides of using Expo before was the inability to use native codes. It was like a mystery box that no one could open up.
However, working with the bare react-native applications was like dealing with lots of stuff, configurations, and mostly banging heads with native codes of Java and Objective-C/Swift. With every new react-native version release, it was a nightmare to upgrade the codebase, and every time, changing some native codes made the feel of breaking the whole application!
Those difficulties always persist unless you have native Android or iOS code experience, which very few react-native developers actually have.
Expo’s Evolution: Empowering Developers with EAS Build and Expo Configs
Things changed over the last few years, and Expo made some revolutionary changes like the EAS build and Expo configs, which made Expo application much more powerful and configurable on the very root level. So now developers can focus more on the application codes and business logic rather than dealing with crazy build errors like incompatible gradle issues, CocoaPods version issues, and so on.
Two years back, Expo introduced development build, which is a fancy term for having your own Expo Go app where you can include any react-native libraries. During the development build(EAS build) phase, it runs the linking commands like pod install internally to link the dependencies that we usually do after installing any react-native package.
Although Expo says you can install any native packages with a development build, but there is a catch! For some native packages, apart from running the command pod install , we have to manually change some codes inside /android and /ios directory. For instance, installing intercom in react-native requires some changes in the native directories. So, by just making a development build, we can not run…
