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 npm install / npx expo start 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.

Harry Hope, Director of Engineering

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