There are thousands of apps on the App Store and Google Play built with Expo's open source tooling and our services. That number is hard to comprehend. What I did not know is whether those apps cover an actual day, start to finish, without me reaching for anything else.
So I tried it. One day, Expo apps only. By breakfast I had paid a celebrity. By lunch I was generating an app. By late afternoon I was sweating through a shirt, and by bedtime I was too tired to feel smug about any of it.
Short answer: yes, you can do this. The longer answer is more interesting, because the places where the day fell apart are the places where somebody should go build something.
Morning
- Rise, sleep tracking and energy forecasts
- Espresso, news from The Economist
- WeatherWise, forecast and live radar
- AirNow, air quality index from the US EPA
- Delish, recipes with video steps
First app of the day was Rise, a sleep tracker. It also predicts when you'll get energy spikes and when your body will naturally want to wind down, which turned out to be handy for planning a day this ridiculous.
Then Espresso, by The Economist. Espresso-sized news, which is the whole idea. Expo has always been good at content-heavy apps like this one, and it shows here. An app like this lives on navigation and linking, which is the job Expo Router does.
I needed to know whether the weather and the air would cooperate. WeatherWise handled the forecast and real-time radar. It feels like the pro version of the weather app that already ships on your phone. For air quality I used AirNow, from the US EPA. It gives you the air quality index where you are and what it'll be like this week. The app could use some UI and UX love, and I'll say that plainly. It also works, and there is something quietly great about the federal government reaching for Expo to help people figure out whether it's safe to go outside during wildfire season.
I'm the primary cook in our family, so I opened Delish looking for dinner ideas. Hand-picked recipes, real videos, step-by-step instructions, no eight-paragraph story about somebody's grandmother sitting on top of the ingredient list. Do not browse it hungry.
The messaging problem
- Cameo, personalized videos from celebrities
Normally this is the point where I text my wife what I'm making. This is also where the day fell apart, because there aren't really any messaging apps built with Expo. We use iMessage. iMessage was off the table.
The trouble with messaging is that building one is not enough. Both people need it. I can ship an app to myself. I cannot ship an app to my wife's reasonable expectations about how she'd like to be contacted. There's a real hole in the market here.
So I got someone else to text her. Cameo is built with Expo, and their team has a case study about scaling on it through a stretch of hyper-growth. Cameo is the app where a celebrity records a message for someone you know. My wife and I watch a lot of Food Network, so I went looking for a Food Network star who could deliver same day. Was this the intended use of Cameo? No. Was it cheap? Also no.
Afternoon
- Tesla, navigation and car controls
- Tommy's Express, drive-through car wash
- Replit, coding with a built-in agent
- Mercari, second-hand marketplace
I found a car wash that uses Expo inside its app, then realized I had no idea how to get there and there's no Expo maps app either. The Tesla app has maps and navigation built in, and it also controls my car, so that solved two problems in one tap.
Once I arrived, the Tommy's Car Wash app let me use a car wash without speaking to a single human being. You pull into the lane marked for the app, it reads your license plate, it already knows your plan and your card, and the gate opens. If you're an introvert, this is close to a religious experience.
Then I went to a cafe to get some work done, using the Replit app. A few YouTube comments have asked for an EAS app where you can check your builds and workflows from your phone, and this seemed like the right day to start one. Replit has an agent built in, so I had it generate a first draft.
I also spent some time in Mercari, a second-hand marketplace where people sell the good stuff out of their closets. For reasons I cannot explain, my feed that day was an oops-all-hats situation. I did find one that is extremely Silicon Valley coded, so I may have to come back for it.
Evening
- Runna, personalized running plans
- Rover, pet sitting and dog walking
- Once Upon, printed photo books
- Voidpet Garden, self-reflection as a game
- Book of the Month, a short list of books to read
I have a race coming up this fall, so I used Runna to track a training run. You tell it a little about yourself and it writes you a personalized plan, whether you're chasing your first 5K or something further out. This is the part of the day where the sweating happened.
After dinner I walked the dog, which reminded me that we need a sitter for a trip later this year. Rover is a beautiful app for finding people who'll look after your pet. Back when I lived in New York City, finding a boarding spot with space was hard. The people I met through Rover were so kind to my dog that I'd book them again without thinking twice.
I also used Once Upon, which turns photos out of your library into a printed book. The app has short videos showing what hardcover versus softcover and matte versus glossy actually look like, which is the detail most apps skip. Then it let me drag photos around until the layout was right.
To unwind I played Voidpet Garden, made by Ben Awad. It gamifies self-reflection. You catch creatures, tend your garden, get into the occasional battle, and along the way it asks how your day went and how things made you feel. We could use more of that as a society.
Last thing of the night was the Book of the Month Club app. Walking into a bookstore means facing a few thousand choices at once. This trims it down to five or seven. I picked one called The Last Contract of Esequibo, mostly for the tagline: "Live by the code or die by the knife." Felt appropriate for development life right now.
Loose ends
Three things resolved after the day was over.
The Cameo did not arrive that evening. Celebrities can be busy, apparently. It showed up a few days later, we loved it, and now I have to make that dinner again.
The photo book came, and it's really nice.
And the EAS app I started in Replit made real progress. I showed it around internally, more people got excited than I expected, and now we're working on it. There should be something to look at later this year.
Where the day broke
The gaps were messaging, maps, and camera, and they're the same gap wearing different clothes.
Messaging is hard because it needs two people to adopt it at the same moment. Maps and camera are hard for the opposite reason. Your phone already ships with a good-enough version, and good-enough is a difficult thing to beat. That's exactly why I want to see what somebody does with them.
One of the bigger goals we have at Expo is to let more people participate in making mobile apps. The screen in your pocket is the screen most of us spend the day looking at, for better and for worse, and everyone should be able to build for it.
Start something
If one of those gaps is your idea, this is the whole on-ramp:
From there, the getting started guide walks you to a build on a real device, and EAS Build takes it to the stores without you touching Xcode or Android Studio. If something gets in your way while you're building it, come tell us in Discord.
