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.

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 more 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

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