[creamyhorror]

We're looking at moving to Expo from RN precisely to reduce the pain & risk of RN+dependency upgrades just to stay compatible.

Google (and Apple) have been keeping us on the upgrade treadmill, so I'm hoping Expo can be responsible for handling that and maintain a stable API for our apps and dependencies.

[foresterre]

At my company we have been using react-native for years without Expo, and aside from some performance issues here or there it has mostly been great (we also use Android auto so that's my reference to "native-ish mobile").

Recently we've been trialling Expo again, and I think it has much approved from where it was a few years ago (when we went in the opposite direction). It mostly saves you time on the build side and gives you some known to work 'good' libraries to depend on, and if you want it, a file based router (we just kept using react-navigation directly, on which the router is built).

The biggest pain in react-native are the major version updates which are regularly breaking (and the lack of css grid , you'll have to make do with flex)

With Expo, that's not necessarily gone, but the updates are usually smaller compared to respective Android updates (but you still need to comply with new rules for app stores), and usually less painful because with Expo (unlike react-native directly) there's less to manually update within the platform native files which is error prone, even when you use Microsoft's upgrade tool. When you are some versions behind it was sometimes easier to bootstrap from scratch and copy over your own code.

One thing to say about Expo is that, here too, it's easier to start with a newly created app than to add expo later on, partly because Expo's docs assumed you did that.

[sagacity]

What makes you think Expo is not going to just be more of the same? Genuine question.

[no_wizard]

They manage so much of the pain points, like the toolchain, building, releasing etc.

It’s night and day compared to using RN directly

[terandle]

Have had our apps on expo for a while. Highly recommend, much easier upgrades and you can turn off any platform vendor stuff like their OTA updates and do local builds also. Expo + RN has saved us a ton of time on our apps and no way a small team like us could support both platforms otherwise.