Aug 9, 2023 by
Gabriel Donadel
To make your development workflow even faster, we are experimenting with a menu bar app that can launch builds and run Snack projects on your devices and simulators. It's called Expo Orbit. It's a macOS menu bar app that allows you to:
Download Orbit and enable the Orbit experiment by going to settings and turning on the "Expo Orbit" experiment under the Experiments section. Note: Orbit relies on xcrun
and the Android SDK for device management, which requires having both Android Studio and Xcode set up.
We can't wait for you to try Orbit, explore its capabilities, and hear your feedback. Your input will shape the future of this tool and guide us on where to take it next.
A big part of the inspiration for this project came from the fantastic work of Shopify, with their internal tool "Tophat". We learned about it through this post in their blog, and the team was kind enough to jump on a call and chat with us about how they built it.
Another great open source macOS menu bar utility for launching iOS/Android simulators/emulators in a similar way to Tophat/Orbit is MiniSim from Oskar Kwaśniewski.