Partiful

Partiful's cross-platform party with Expo

In college, connection is close to inevitable. There are countless opportunities to find a tribe of friends in class, at the dining hall, in the gym, or the library, or the dorms. But mostly, there are parties. People go to parties with the intention to connect. And so it happens.


After college, the parties are harder to find. And since the pandemic, there are even less of them.
And that is why Partiful was founded. 

 to make it fast and fun to create, promote, and celebrate real-world social events.


The mission of the company is to address the fundamental challenge of making meaningful friendshipsin adulthood. Partiful is helping to cultivate more opportunities for connection by reducingplanning friction, and improving interactions surrounding in-person events.

"We see all kinds of different parties every week. There are unique and creative little theme>events like puppy parties, water-tasting parties, produce parties, and pickle ball parties. And>also some really meaningful events like weddings and vow renewals."

So how did this small team of talented full stack developers go from web app to app store in just six months? That's where Expo comes in.

Eat, drink, and evaluate cross-platform developer tools

Originally, Partiful was a web app. But they wanted to add a mobile app and began evaluating cross-platform development tools with the following requirements:

Seamless integration with React/Typescript

Performance optimization, especially for animations

During their evaluation, Partiful considered several platforms like Ionic, Swift with Objective C, and Flutter. However, these platforms either required a larger team, were not as integrative with React, or necessitated a shift from their existing Typescript preference.


Expo was originally suggested by a friend of Partiful. So they gave it a try and had Expo up and running on a phone in seconds. As an engineering team of React developers they immediately felt comfortable in the React Native Environment. They were also pleased with all the existing libraries to choose from and with the massive community of Expo experts online.


Before breaking ground on their mobile app the team at Partiful expected Expo to help them translate the web app to mobile fairly effortlessly. What they didn't realize at the time was how much more Expo would help them do.

Getting the party started: How Partiful built their iOS app

Partiful's journey with Expo began with an attempt to mirror the web experience in a mobile app. For this team of React developers, with little experience in mobile development, the process went unexpectedly fast. The engineers felt so comfortable in the React Native environment that they started adding features and capabilities to their V1 app. Instead of shipping an MVP, with Expo they could ship an app that they all felt proud of and excited about.


Today the app takes advantage of many tools and services in the Expo ecosystem including:

 including Contacts, Photos, Clipboard, Calendar, Crypto, Linear Gradient, File System

The team at Partiful was introduced to Expo right when the Expo Router beta was released. At the time they invested energy in Expo Router because it felt exciting. But they were quickly sold on the 

. Because Partiful began with a web product that they plan to maintain in perpetuity it was important to them that they build universal links. And they were impressed with Expo Router's solution.


For Partiful the universal links are essential because of the way that their service is consumed. When someone creates an event and sends out the link people need to be able to open the link in their preferred platform. At this time, most of those people don't have the app so they'll use the web browser. But some people are opening links in the app and that number will continue to grow as their user base grows.

"As a team we're very dedicated to great user experiences. It's super important to us that the experience we deliver our end users is smooth and intuitive." 

"The most surprising thing about using Expo is that we have not had to open Xcode one time since we>started building. But that's just one small perk. The real value for us is that Expo has allowed>all our engineers to focus on solving problems. Nobody needs to waste time on the messy work of>building systems and writing boilerplate code to get something rendered. Expo helps our engineers>focus on solving problems and making the product better for our users." 


In addition to the efficiency Expo brought to Partiful's engineering org, it also changed the way they thought about hiring. Since they started building with Expo the team has grown from three engineers to ten. 

Because Expo was so intuitive, it allowed them to continue bringing in React developers that could have an impact immediately.

With Expo, Partiful didn't just migrate; they innovated. Here are some notable victories:

Seamless Integration: All the necessary native APIs for features like calendar, photos, contacts, and notifications were readily available via Expo.

Simplified Workflow: Developers never had to access Xcode, and interactions with the app store were streamlined.

Quick Updates: With EAS update, product iterations became swift, allowing the team to focus more on user experience.

Expanded its user base across multiple countries.

Partiful's app is global and their user base is growing. But this is just the beginning. The Brooklyn based company is 

 with the intention of continuing their momentum, expanding their services and cultivating more moments of connection for people all around the world.


Want to learn more about Partiful? Check out their 

Better

To get us moving fast and building out a mobile department at Better, we started with React Native. This allowed us to develop cross-platform with maximal code sharing. Although this is a fantastic speed increase, we still ultimately had the overhead of trusting and navigating React Native’s open source community and 3rd party libraries.


After the Expo team released their “Bare Workflow” which allowed us to finally use Expo 

 drop into the native layer at the same time, we experienced the pleasure of being able to selectively use Expo’s curated, well documented tools & libraries. We were thrilled, and we haven’t looked back. A great example of this is something as useful and simple as the 

 library, an elegant solution to the previously clunky "white screen" issue that comes with React Native.


When the path of least resistance is also the best solution and user experience, Expo helped us find the optimal solutions that are also easy to integrate and onboard our mobile teams with.

Insider

Our team was delighted to find that Expo hit nearly every one of the qualities we value as engineers:

Onboarding new engineers needed to be quick and intuitive, and not require the creation of new internal tools from the ground up.-Applications needed to compile quickly so that developers could crank out new features and fixes at speed.

Those changes needed to be easily preview-able and modifiable, even by less technical team members.

Testing and code quality checks needed to happen automatically.

Shipping to production needed to be seamless and free from any inefficiencies that might allow for human error.

We used to maintain two separate apps: one for iOS, and one for Android. This posed the usual challenges, like having to hire a 1:1:1 ratio of Android, iOS, and web developers, having to organize and maintain cross-platform feature parity, having to understand the ins and outs of native build management, etc. But, each cross platform solution we looked into was always missing something, or looked as if it would bottleneck us in the long run, and we wanted to find a solution that would never limit us, and we could always be on the cutting edge with.


With Expo, we were able to put together a proof-of-concept in a week, and the team was easily able to debunk the performance concerns around React Native. Nine months later we launched a completely redesigned, multi-platform app that our users love, and that our developers love to work on.


Expo allowed our web developers to effortlessly transition into mobile developers using their existing skills and tools they were already familiar with. It made development a breeze, and allowed us to share builds with our stakeholders early on in the development process by simply passing around QR codes and having them open Expo Go on their phones. The ability to quickly bootstrap a mobile app by running 

 and snapping a QR code on your phone’s camera to preview is, simply put, an incredible workflow.

Expo has been an integral part of our mobile strategy and helped us launch an app that our readers love in an abbreviated timeframe, and as a result our team is now fully invested in Expo/React Native as our mobile technology platform for the future.

Blackline

Before Expo, our app was purely native (one code base for Android and another for iOS), and we had a few key items we wanted to address in our rewrite of the app:

Reduce the disparity between mobile dev skills and the rest of our engineering skillset.

Make hiring new engineers easier and faster.

Move from a somewhat manual CI/CD to an almost completely hands-off approach.

Heighten our team's overall developer productivity.

By shifting to React Native and almost entirely JavaScript, mobile development is now better aligned with our organization’s engineering skillset. This also improved our recruitment because we can consider strong front-end engineers with experience in just React and JavaScript.


Shifting over to JavaScript also helped us scale by empowering other teams within BlackLine to build and extend the mobile app into their own domains. Additionally, we share libraries and code between mobile and web, which greatly reduces our surface area. I can't overstate the benefits of being able to apply our JS / web-based skills, standards, and tooling to mobile development.

Expo also dramatically improved our CI/CD processes. We take full advantage of Expo CLI (and are now using EAS Build) to fully automate our app deployments through CI. Additionally, by leveraging Expo Application Services, we don’t need to pay for or manage any internal app build infrastructure. It's all there for us whenever we need it.


Finally, by using Expo's developer tools (like Expo Go), we’ve seen some great developer productivity gains. We iterate on features more quickly, and that’s really allowed our team to focus more on satisfying our customers. We can better manage security and quality by leveraging various Expo APIs and developer tools, which allows us to accomplish internal testing more easily. We have less tech debt, and upgrading is as easy as running one single command. Plus, the Expo Go app allows us to easily provide the application to non-engineers on the team for testing and troubleshooting.

Besides Expo's services and tools, we also heavily rely on the SDK for adding cross platform 

 functionality to our app, just via JavaScript. Some of our favorite pieces of the SDK include:

 has allowed us to manage local app data in a secure manner.

 have provided a great framework for in-app document management.

 allows us to manage updating our app over the air very nicely, without users ever having to take any steps to update. For BlackLine, security and controls are paramount to protecting our customers data, and leveraging Expo to automate controls around our release process with Over the Air updates and release channels is a huge win that goes beyond dev productivity and CI/CD tooling.

There are quite a few others that I won’t name specifically, but that generally abstract lower-level APIs and give us those developer productivity gains.

Overall, Expo's tools and APIs have allowed us to focus more on building features for our customers rather than managing infrastructure and building our own platform level components and APIs.

Bounce

With EAS we were able to provide continuous delivery of our mobile applications.Later we expanded our pipelines to leverage OTA updates, ensuring changes are delivered to our mobile customers at the same pace as our web customers.The combination of EAS and expo-updates was easy to set up, avoiding the need to have experts on native platforms or expensive build machines to support iOS.

Using the classic Expo experience with Expo Go we were able to quickly build pull request previews for our mobile apps. All this with the bonus of using convenient QR codes to allow Product teams to access the preview builds effortlessly. This speed and convenience would have been impossible with vanilla react-native.

Bonus: An amazing development experience 🤩

The first two points were already enough juice for us to migrate our react-native applications to Expo. But as a bonus, we also received a much-appreciated upgrade on our development experience provided by the Expo CLI and development tooling.
No more hassle to set up local native development environments, and we now leverage the amazing collection of expo libraries which has been an incredible time-saver for us.


Wanna store your bags with Bounce in any city? Visit 

PlayOn

How Playon builds ticketing and iOS apps with Expo, Stripe, AWS and LaunchDarkly

Schools are often overwhelmed with administrative work and don’t have time to manage all their events and activities in multiple platforms, promote their events, AND create an engaging fan experience.


We empower schools with applications and services to connect, communicate, and compete like never before. Schools can save time with a complete solution for ticketing, streaming, fundraising, concessions, sponsorships, and website management in one trusted and dependable platform. With PlayOn, schools can engage their communities and energize the event experience.

Building a platform that delivers all these services to thousands of schools and millions of end users is a challenge. In this blog, we’ll focus on our experience building ticketing and point-of-sale applications with Expo, AWS, Stripe, LaunchDarkly, and other technologies.

In our latest major app upgrade, PlayOn needed full-feature parity in iOS, Android, and web. A huge concern was being able to optimize the app for bursty seasonal peak traffic. We also wanted a platform that could support a team of JavaScript and React experts with varying levels of native app development experience.
Flutter and Ionic were investigated as alternative native development frameworks. We also considered having separate applications for web and native, but settled on a single codebase using React Native Web. React Native Web allowed us to reuse much of our frontend logic and quickly deliver feature parity on multiple platforms at once.


We chose Expo as our framework because it helps development teams in many ways. Expo further abstracts native hassles like managing certs and distributing builds. We’ve used 

 have saved us countless hours of troubleshooting time.


It wasn’t a challenging decision to go with Expo. Members of our team had experience with it at other companies. I had been an early adopter of React Native in 2016. And over the years, I’ve watched the React Native developer experience improve significantly. 

 come to mind as major advancements, as well as big improvements with Expo, like the additions of 

After years of community contributions, React Native apps now feel like natural iOS and Android native applications, to users and developers alike. We knew we could build great applications with Expo.

At PlayOn, we partner with over 15,000 high schools and 64 state and conference associations to set the standard for in-person, live-stream, and on-demand events. Millions of people nationwide access events with PlayOn.


Our ticketing products leveraging Expo are GoFan and Box Office. GoFan is our consumer iOS, Android, and web application for users to buy tickets to events. Box Office is our point-of-sale iOS application for schools to sell tickets, concessions, merchandise, and more at school venues.

The GoFan application enhances the fan experience beyond the gate, by providing a personalized and flexible way for fans to purchase and redeem tickets. Fans can follow their favorite schools and teams, discover upcoming events, and more.

, schools can sell tickets, passes, digital concessions, reserved seats, and merchandise in addition to collecting donations onsite. Schools can accept payments with credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay using iOS devices and card readers. Schools can also use Box Office for offline redemption to scan tickets for event entry.


The GoFan (ticketing) and Box Office (point-of-sale) apps are very similar architecturally. The biggest difference is that Box Office is iOS-only and integrates with the Stripe Terminal card reader. We provide many schools with iPads that have Box Office pre-installed, along with Stripe M2 Readers.


For GoFan and Box Office, the development team has many git branches in flight for upcoming releases. When any pull request is merged to a release branch, our CircleCi pipeline runs a number of quality scans including unit tests, smoke tests, security scans, and more. After all quality checks pass, the pipeline runs a “sync” script that merges all new commits to all the subsequent release branches, alerting us of any merge conflicts for immediate resolution. Once all the releases are in sync, the entire team (devs, QA, design, and some business stakeholders) has permission to run EAS builds for any upcoming release, targeting any of our many backend API test environments. Thanks to Expo’s support for React Native Web, we can generate web builds and run ECS deployments for our web application from the same pipeline. After a production web release, we will immediately submit the latest production EAS builds to the iOS and Android stores.


GoFan and Box Office integrate with many of the PlayOn backend APIs to display information about schools, teams, and events. Fans can add tickets, merchandise, concessions, and more to their carts. When they are ready to check out, the apps integrate with Stripe’s React Native SDKs to render payment elements and confirm payments. This keeps the entire payment process secure by leveraging Stripe’s secure APIs and never storing or transmitting any of the users’ card data through our own servers.


Our native CI diagrams are a blend of Expo’s recommended “[Persistent Staging](https://docs.expo.dev/eas-update/deployment-patterns/#persistent-staging-flow)” and “[Branch Promotion](https://docs.expo.dev/eas-update/deployment-patterns/#branch-promotion-flow)” flows, with some additional steps to deploy our react-native-web application to AWS. Expo has some of the best documentation out there ([deployment patterns](https://docs.expo.dev/eas-update/deployment-patterns/) for example) for managing React Native projects.


Here is a basic high-level overview of how we run builds of our application code. Thanks to react-native-web, the same codebase has many pipelines for running web builds via Nextjs, and native builds via EAS.

AWS powers most of our production workflows. We have many AWS experts with a variety of skillsets. We use ECS to host our production web applications (running react native-web code), and Amultitude of backend services, some of which integrate directly with our Expo apps.

 as our platform for all payment processing in our applications. Our Expo apps integrate with Stripe directly and use several Stripe npm packages.

 for feature flagging in our Expo applications (and other applications). We are regularly discovering new use cases for feature-flagging, and it hasbecome a powerful tool in the planning and delivery of new features.

This architecture is continuing to evolve as we discover new opportunities to deliver valuable features faster and with higher quality. On previous versions of these apps which did not use Expo, the native build process was cumbersome and required the time of senior engineers to generate test builds for our various testing environments. Development environments were brittle and builds were slow.


Now, Expo has become the backbone of how we generate native development environments and builds, and it has enabled a team of many developers and stakeholders to move fast on new ideas. This pipeline, along with LaunchDarkly feature flags, has increased the team’s confidence and innovation. Having these tools has given us new opportunities to quickly prototype and experiment that we did not have previously.

“Expo” means different things to different developers. Some people just think of open-source libraries when they hear “Expo”. Some people think of their Build service and others just think of 

So I’ll detail here what parts of Expo we use at PlayOn:

 allows many developers of all experience levels to target and distribute builds across our multiple environments quickly and easily. EAS build has given autonomy to our QA team who can run their own builds without having to wait on developers.

 for automatically uploading our production builds to TestFlight and Google Play, which speeds up our releases.

 allows us to connect with our fans and get valuable feedback. We introduced some prompts with this library a few months ago. Using this tool to connect with our fans gave us invaluable feedback.

: We use full brightness when users enter the gate in case they are in a dark stadium.

: lets us serve users more relevant results for school search.

: We were hesitant to drop support for Expo Go, which our developers were all familiar with, but switching to expo-dev-client brought consistency to our dev environments and its debug tools have improved our developer experience.

: We had many production web URLs that needed to support deep linking after our migration.

The ROI of Expo: Developer autonomy and time saved

Prior to building with Expo, we had a React web SPA and a bare React Native iOS app that was difficult to maintain, did not have native feature parity, and did not support Android. We now have a single codebase that continues to evolve and supports all three platforms, with full feature parity. That alone is a sufficient ROI, but the value of Expo has gone much further for us.


Building and distributing our iOS builds used to be challenging because it required the involvement of senior developers for simple builds, and we had limited testing environments. With Expo, developers and test engineers of all experience levels are empowered to build and distribute apps across multiple test environments whenever they want. The result is a higher quality app that is easier to maintain and continuously delivers new features and optimizations.


Expo-dev-client and EAS, along with Expo’s developer tools, have saved our team countless hours in setting up builds and context switching. Using EAS with our internal pipelines has improved communication with our QA team and increased everyone’s autonomy. We have a robust development runway for native applications that would not be possible without Expo.


Another pleasant surprise is just how many React Native packages work out of the box with Expo nowadays, and how many package developers intentionally support Expo. In the early days, there were many compatibility issues between JavaScript, React Native, Expo, XCode, and Android Studio, with many painful native “gotchas”, but now packages generally tend to “just work” in a way that could be taken for granted by new adopters. Due diligence is still needed to ensure the quality and compatibility of any package, but the community has come a long way, and it feels like anything is possible.

The React Native community is innovating fast, but one consequence of this innovation is that packages fall out of date quickly. Being on top of package management is essential to the survival of React Native applications.


Thankfully, Expo version updates are usually straightforward, and Expo provides great documentation. These updates provide a good opportunity to audit and update the rest of your packages and keep the team informed of the latest API changes and improvements.

PlayOn will continue to innovate and build products that serve our schools best and allow them to connect with their communities in dynamic and engaging ways.

 and how it will simplify our routing and navigation across platforms. We are also planning to leverage 

 to speed up delivery. With Expo as a core part of our team’s tool set, we continue to find new and exciting opportunities for our applications.

Cameo

We've seen hyper-growth on the Cameo platform over the last couple of years, and all this usage of our app put an enormous pressure on our engineering team to scale quickly. Expo has been integral to our ability to quickly release valuable and engaging features. Even if new team members come from web development backgrounds, they can still move straight into developing our native apps right from day one.

Expo’s large collection of official React Native packages and managed deployment infrastructure enables us to deliver a more feature-rich app to more users than the capacity of our engineering team would otherwise allow.


Just this year [2021], we've doubled our engineering team's size in order to ship more features and help creators continue to delight their fans. With all these new hires, working with Expo means the team can continue to move at lightning speed, and won't be slowed down while onboarding new team members.

View our open roles [here](https://boards.greenhouse.io/cameo)!

Petal

Simplicity is where high-quality systems and products overlap: we believe that minimal, consistent APIs and user experiences are what successful, innovative product are made of. Expo delivers on this big time by giving us just one platform to develop against, and then delivering cross platform support as a result. Expo also handles so much of the heavy lifting to abstract away platform complexities, which allows us to focus more on product experience. Because it's easier to build in a cross-platform way, both our UX and code are much more consistent across all features.

Turning web devs into native devs overnight

Before Expo, our product was web-only because we only had React developers. Once we had built our web frontend, and were thinking ahead to building our mobile app, we wanted to keep the same rapid development workflow and continuous deployment ethos that had so far allowed us to move so fast. When we found Expo, it gave us the right set of tools and APIs to deliver the product experience we wanted, while enabling us to build our engineering team in a lean and focused way, without sacrificing developer experience.


Along with avoiding the need of separate teams iOS, Android, and web teams, Expo actually allowed our engineers to do 

 than they would have if we had dedicated teams for each platform. Many more engineers at our company can contribute to the product experience on all platforms now, even engineers who hadn't had mobile experience in the past. Now, we focus on hiring more full-stack engineers who can contribute to the backend too, since we don't need platform-specialists. All of this means engineers can lead full projects end-to-end.

In terms of shipping to production, not only has Expo increased our velocity in terms of features and bug fixes, but it has also turned shipping into almost a non-event for us, since everything is so well automated. Deployments and publishing make it so easy to get changes out, and even revert quickly from Expo CLI. I can't imagine going back to app store deployments when something needs to get out fast. This release speed means we spend less time fiddling with build tools and workflows, and more time learning from customers and implementing product functionality.


To summarize - Expo allowed us to ship our mobile apps and subsequent major product features on schedule with a small, scrappy frontend team of just two React engineers.

Nathan Kane, Software Engineering Director

Flexport

We first used Expo in order to build a quick prototype of our app during an internal hackathon. This allowed us to move fast, and address some concerns early on. What we proved with this prototype was:

the performance was indistinguishable from native for us

engineers with no mobile experience could be productive within hours.

Beyond those two things, we also wanted our app to:

Support both Android and iOS with little to no platform-specific code

Have access to hardware features like GPS, notifications, etc.

Expo and React Native promised and delivered on all of these fronts, and more. The codebase is manageable, we haven’t needed to write any native code, and we only have two React Native components with platform-specific definitions.


Expo also saves our engineers time by providing killer deployment tools, powerful abstractions over native APIs, excellent documentation, and simple integrations with services like Sentry and Amplitude. All this time saved means our engineers can take on more ownership of the product itself, and lead features end-to-end.


Although engineers are taking on more ownership themselves, collaborating with other engineers, designers, and product managers is still made easy with Expo. Each time a git branch is updated, we automatically deploy a new JS bundle, and any team member can scan a QR code to open that version of the app in Expo Go on their phone.

A concern we had was that everything would work well early on, but that we’d eventually outgrow things once we were in a production environment. That hasn’t happened for us. Flexport is starting to explore new use cases for greenfield mobile apps, and our plan is to invest further in React Native and Expo.

Goody

We started with Expo at Goody right from the beginning, even though I've done native iOS development in the past. When I did native iOS development, it felt like it took such a long time to do anything. Iteration speed was slowed by doing manual layout UI, and animations in particular took a while to build and still felt fragile at the end of it all. But with Expo, our iteration speed skyrocketed, and people rave about the polish of our app (some can't even believe that the app isn't purely native code).
We've been able to deliver a level of polish we otherwise wouldn't be able to, thanks to how much simpler it is to deliver that quality product with React Native, and we've been able to do that on iOS and Android simultaneously without doubling our team size.

But, React Native leaves some critical things up to the developer, and that's where Expo comes in. Expo fills these gaps to create an end-to-end development environment that makes building 

 shipping with React Native a streamlined system – in particular, with OTA updates, push notifications, builds, and development tooling:

Expo's push notifications makes sending pushes ridiculously simple without having to mess with a push notification server or integrate another SDK.

OTA updates allow us to ship more quickly and, importantly, get and respond to feedback quickly. They allow us to ship more often and more iteratively, instead of relying on a rigid release timeline.

Expo Dev Client allows our developers to work on a real device, with instant refreshes, without having to open up Xcode or even needing it installed, while still supporting all of the native client code that we need.

EAS Build allows us to easily provision and build ad-hoc builds for our internal team to test and provide feedback on. This is not only useful for pre-production testing, but also leads to team alignment and buy-in for what you're building when stakeholders can see and use the product right away, without a lengthy TestFlight process. Plus, onboarding team members to ad-hoc builds with just a link is ridiculously easy compared to the manual process.

On a more general scale, Expo also helps our devs develop what we believe is one of the core components of good engineers teams: ownership.


With Expo, each engineer is able to own the whole stack&ndash; from backend, to web, to mobile, even though not everyone has worked on mobile before. Everyone on the team can contribute to our mobile app, they don't even need to install Xcode or Android Studio to start contributing – they can just install our Dev Client on their phone and scan the QR code from their local Expo dev server. What this means is that each person has the ownership to take a project and deliver it across backend, web, and mobile if need be. We don't have to consider "this person isn't a mobile person", because that's now in every team member's skillset.


Plus, since each person on our team understands more of how everything works, we can move quickly without having to coordinate across platform-specific teams. We build and iterate more, and think less about the mechanics of shipping releases or managing push notifications. Faster iterations means a faster feedback loop, which means we rely less on what we guess will work, and instead test things in the real world and get real data. As a result, we can more directly see if the work we're doing is having the intended effect. This not only has an effect on helping us build the right product, but also helps us make sure we accurately understand and evolve our positioning as a business.

Choosing React Native and Expo meant that we were able to build an app in record time. Speed was critical during the early days of the pandemic. And since 99+% of our codebase was platform agnostic, we onboarded two additional web developers in 24 hours, something we could never have done using Swift and Kotlin.

Going from an idea to 1 million users in a week

The timeline we were able to achieve with Expo is what really astounded us: 36 hours after the first line of code, we were live on both the App Store and Google Play Store. The following few days, if there was a bug, we were able to identify and fix it in seconds thanks to Expo's Over the Air Updates. In the rapidly changing environment of the pandemic, it’s essential for us to quickly release to stay ahead of the curve and have the most meaningful data available for our data scientists. Over-the-Air Updates enable us to deliver new features instantly to our users, and send out bug fixes quicker than we could've ever imagined.


As you can tell, speed is our modus operandi. Previously, we were writing separate native Swift and Kotlin apps. This was a problem, since as a small startup, we were trying to iterate fast and find product-market fit. Releasing natively on both platforms required having two engineering teams, and because of the slower release speed, we weren't learning the way we wanted to. Once we made the switch to React Native & Expo, this problem disappeared, since the work was basically cut in half. For example- one feature we love from Expo is everything around notifications. All the complexity is abstracted away in favor of one simple API, so that end-to-end we never have to think about platform-specifics.

We’ve not yet reached any major limitation for the features we’ve wanted to develop. So far, our experience is that React Native works well, even when installed on 2+ million devices of all shapes and sizes, and we're excited to continue growing with Expo.

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