At Expo, we want to build the best framework and infrastructure for app creators. My co-founder, Charlie Cheever, has long had a guiding vision for creators to go from an idea to an app in people's hands as fast as possible. I think about this as democratizing software: like writing, where everyone writes even if they're not professional writers, many more people will build the apps they want for themselves, their friends, and their communities. Generative AI is a catalyst for this transformation, and we are positioning Expo to be near its center.
Our open strategy is to build an app-creator ecosystem made up of many companies working on AI-assisted creator tools. Expo's main role here is to provide the best app framework for these tools to target and run the apps they create, and the best infrastructure to build, test, and deploy both native apps and websites. Many companies will specialize in AI-assisted app creation, and our role is to provide an excellent foundation everyone can build upon. Today, only 2.5% of the U.S. workforce are developers; to enable the other 97.5% to create apps themselves is a many-company, big effort — and an equally big opportunity.
To this end, we'll expand the audience of the Expo framework and EAS to include both human developers and AI agents. We'll need to think about what it means to design CLIs and UIs for agents. For instance, topics like human–computer interaction (HCI) and accessibility will have analogues for AI agents, like agent–computer interaction and agent accessibility. There is early prior art like Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) to define programmatic interfaces for AI agents and Matt Biilmann's writing about agent experience (AX) to define programmatic interfaces for AI agents as an analogue to UX. Also, StackBlitz's WebContainers have been a promising way to run Expo CLI and the dev server in the web browser, making the Expo framework more accessible to browser-using agents like OpenAI's Operator. By including AI agents as first-class users of Expo's software and services, we'll help other companies making AI-assisted tools to swiftly adopt Expo and EAS, and ultimately make it easier for creators to deliver beautiful, universal native apps.
Several companies already interoperate with the Expo framework to begin making this a reality. In the last few weeks, Replit, Bolt, Rork, a0.dev, Appacella, Makeway, and bfloat launched AI agents that enable creators to prompt from "idea to app store". Vercel has published docs on using their AI SDK within apps made with Expo. We've also published llms.txt to better inform AI-assisted tools like Cursor about the Expo APIs and services. You can expect more to come in this rapidly evolving space, both from other companies and from us at Expo.
However, we are also aware the proliferation of new tools may create feelings of AI fatigue in some developers. Similar to the JavaScript ecosystem, which went through periods of high-entropy growth, AI-assisted dev tools will gradually mature. Our role in the AI ecosystem is to provide the Expo framework and EAS as a dependable foundation for both human developers and AI agents. I believe it's a matter of when, not if, AI will become proficient at generating many classes of apps—and it's necessary for our company that Expo and EAS are parts of the best development ecosystem that AI agents use.
Expo's open AI strategy is to democratize app creation through many-company collaboration. For us, this is also a movement. We aim to enable a sea change of new creators, and level up experienced developers, by providing the Expo framework and EAS as the best foundation for AI-assisted creator tools to run and distribute their users' apps. We invite creators, developers, and companies big and small to join us in shaping a future where going from idea to app is faster and more accessible than ever.
James Ide
Co-founder and CTO, Expo
March 4th, 2025