Converting Existing React Native Projects to Expo

26
votes

I'm considering building mobile apps in React Native using Expo and I noticed under FAQ that existing React Native projects can be converted to Expo.

What exactly are we converting? I really like staying as pure and clean as possible without too many abstraction layers in the middle which can obscure my ability to understand what's really happening for things to work in the app.

I'd appreciate a bit more clarification about what's really happening in the conversion process and what Expo is adding to the existing project.

1
react-nativeexpo

1 Answers

13
votes

This topic is covered in the Expo XDE readme.

However, we didn't get it working and decided to port our code into the default Expo app (Edit: after hitting a lot of issues porting our app to Expo, we decided to revert to vanilla RN).

There are at least a few required steps missing from the documentation:

  • Create exp.json file

  • Update React and React Native libraries to the versions required by Exponent

    "react": "16.0.0-alpha.6", "react-native": "https://github.com/expo/react-native/archive/sdk-16.0.0.tar.gz",

We summarized on our blog why we gave up on Expo in its current form.