Jumpstarting A Mobile Team

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 and 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 expo-app-loading 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.

Dax Booysen, Engineering Manager, Mobile