June 2026 Summaries

Expo is seeking one to two individuals to join its technical business development team, offering a unique opportunity for those with technical skills to gain business and market insights within a mobile infrastructure company. Aimed at individuals familiar with the Expo platform, the role involves researching leading mobile teams, initiating conversations with engineers and tech leaders, and assisting companies unfamiliar with Expo services. Colin Hunt, who pioneered this technical BDR role, shares insights into his journey from app development to business development, emphasizing the importance of genuine engagement, understanding developer needs, and building trust. His approach focuses on learning why potential clients aren't using Expo and addressing those barriers, rather than traditional sales tactics. Expo values curiosity, technical expertise, and a passion for mobile app development, and is looking for individuals who are not only familiar with Expo but can also contribute to building a brand known for helping developers create valuable solutions.

Convincing decision-makers to invest in mobile app development requires demonstrating the significant advantages apps hold over mobile web solutions, including higher conversion rates, reduced cart abandonment, and enhanced user engagement through direct communication channels like push notifications. While traditional concerns over the cost and complexity of app development have deterred many businesses, tools like Expo have simplified the process by allowing developers to use a single codebase for both iOS and Android, leveraging existing React teams and cloud-based infrastructure to manage builds and updates efficiently. The market for mobile applications continues to expand rapidly, with consumer spending on apps climbing, and industries ranging from e-commerce to healthcare reaping the benefits of app functionalities like offline access, biometric security, and real-time notifications. The reduced execution cost facilitated by modern development tools has shifted the focus from debating the need for an app to determining the fastest way to deploy one, emphasizing how quickly businesses can begin to capture the revenue and engagement benefits associated with mobile app usage.

The blog post explores the challenges and strategies for creating visually compelling apps using design principles and AI tools, emphasizing the gap between apps made with basic vibe coding tools and professionally crafted ones. It highlights the importance of design principles such as contrast, hierarchy, alignment, proximity, repetition, balance, white space, and unity in achieving a polished and unique app design. The post critiques a before-and-after example of app design, illustrating how feedback based on these principles can transform an app's visual appeal. It warns against relying solely on AI for design, as it can result in utilitarian and sterile user experiences, and encourages using AI-generated designs as a foundation to be refined with human creativity. The blog encourages using these design principles as a framework for iterative improvement in collaboration with AI, to ensure apps stand out in a crowded market.

Widgets and Live Activities provide a seamless way for apps to deliver timely, relevant information to users without requiring them to open the app, enhancing user engagement and retention. With Expo SDK 56, developers can now build these features using expo-widgets, which simplifies the process of creating and managing widgets and Live Activities as React components rendered through SwiftUI. This update eliminates the need for a separate iOS project and offers improvements such as direct environment reception for widgets and Live Activities, better error handling, and configurable widgets. The utility of widgets and Live Activities lies in their ability to keep users informed and engaged with minimal interaction, offering value through easy access to essential data like flight updates or workout timers during ongoing events. The success of apps like Flighty, which integrates these features to provide real-time travel information, illustrates the potential benefits of adopting this approach. By allowing for independent rendering and server-side updates, expo-widgets empower developers to focus on delivering critical information efficiently, enhancing the user experience without overwhelming the app's main interface.

EAS Observe is a production performance monitoring tool tailored for React Native applications, providing insights into how apps perform under real-world conditions by tracking metrics like cold launch, time to interactive, and bundle load across various devices and networks. While in open beta, it is free for up to 10,000 monthly active users, with plans for scalable paid tiers post-beta, maintaining a free tier for smaller apps. The tool fills a gap between development and crash tools by offering real startup metrics and performance insights out of the box, allowing developers to pinpoint slowdowns and performance regressions with detailed context such as device model and network type. Observe integrates seamlessly with Expo SDK 56+ and supports per-screen navigation metrics, offering custom events and session drill-down capabilities. Additionally, it includes integration with EAS CLI for querying metrics via terminal commands and is designed for agentic analysis, enabling setup and data analysis through intuitive commands. Future improvements include enhanced dashboard features, crash reporting, request timing analysis, and alert management, with ongoing development guided by user feedback.

The text discusses the challenges and solutions for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) in mobile app development, highlighting the complexity of configuring processes for building and deploying mobile apps, especially for iOS. It critiques the inadequacies of generalized CI/CD services for mobile apps and introduces specialized tools such as EAS Workflows, Bitrise, Codemagic, GitHub Actions, and CircleCI, each offering varied features to address common issues like build speed, code signing, artifact storage, and cost structures. EAS Workflows, developed by Expo, is emphasized for its ease of use with React Native and Expo projects, providing efficient configurations and features like fingerprint-based build skipping, which significantly reduces build times. Bitrise is noted for its extensive library of pre-built steps and support for multiple frameworks, while Codemagic is recognized for its Flutter support and straightforward pricing. GitHub Actions and CircleCI are mentioned as general-purpose platforms with certain limitations for mobile-specific tasks. The text also outlines the distinctive requirements of mobile CI/CD compared to web CI/CD, such as mandatory code signing and the need for macOS hardware for iOS builds, and suggests evaluating tools based on project frameworks, existing CI platforms, and available development resources.

Expo SDK 56 introduces precompiled Expo modules on iOS using XCFrameworks, significantly reducing native build overhead by default, both locally and on EAS Build, without requiring configuration changes. This marks the start of a transition from CocoaPods to Swift Package Manager (Swift PM), Apple's modern dependency management system, aiming to solve issues related to legacy infrastructure and expensive native builds. By distributing many Expo modules as precompiled XCFrameworks, repeated native compilation work is reduced, resulting in faster local iterations and EAS Builds. Challenges in shifting from a CocoaPods environment to modular XCFrameworks include adapting Expo Modules Core to be compatible with Swift PM, addressing architectural issues such as illegal header exports, and resolving Swift and Objective-C cycles. Additionally, infrastructure improvements like automatically generating Package.swift files and supporting both CocoaPods and Swift PM ensure a smooth transition. This modernization effort is part of a broader initiative to enhance Expo's integration with Apple's development ecosystem, aiming for faster builds, improved tooling, and a future eventually free of CocoaPods dependencies.

Expo SDK 56 introduces a Kotlin compiler plugin that significantly enhances performance by eliminating reflection from Expo Modules on Android, resulting in a 70% faster module initialization, a 30% reduction in time to first render, and Record conversions that are approximately six times faster than in SDK 55. This performance boost is automatically applied during compilation without requiring any code changes from app developers, while module maintainers can opt into the faster Record conversion with a single annotation. The post explains the evolution from Unimodules to the current Expo Modules API, highlighting the limitations of reflection in terms of startup time and the challenges faced in addressing these issues. The new K2 compiler, with its plugin API, allows for direct editing of intermediate representations, thus avoiding the need for code generation and the complexities it brings. The plugin substitutes runtime reflection with pre-computed type descriptors and baked-in Record metadata, offering a more efficient alternative to the traditional reflection-based methods. The approach is poised to expand further, aiming to enhance other parts of the module lifecycle while maintaining the API's ergonomic design.

Expo is recommending users transition from @expo/vector-icons to the latest versions of icon-pack-specific @react-native-vector-icons packages, which are fully compatible with Expo apps, including Expo Go. This change is aimed at streamlining the ecosystem, minimizing confusion, and potentially reducing app bundle sizes. Initially created as a convenience wrapper around react-native-vector-icons, @expo/vector-icons is now seen as unnecessary due to the evolution of Expo and the improved capabilities of direct integrations with expo-font. The migration to @react-native-vector-icons offers benefits such as access to the latest icon sets, easier creation of custom icons, reduced app bloat, and a cleaner project setup by eliminating the need for aliasing configurations. To facilitate a smooth migration, Expo has provided a codemod tool to update imports and emphasizes the importance of checking for potential icon font conflicts. Although around 60% of apps on EAS Build use @expo/vector-icons, Expo plans to maintain the package temporarily to allow time for migration, while encouraging users to report any issues encountered during the transition. This strategic shift aligns with Expo's focus on enhancing platform-level capabilities and relying on community packages for icon solutions.

App.js 2026, the largest React Native and Expo conference of the year, took place in Kraków, bringing together over 500 developers to discuss advancements and the future of these technologies. The event highlighted the adaptability of React Native and Expo in the AI era, emphasizing how their JavaScript and TypeScript foundations provide robust training data for AI models. Key developments in Expo, such as the Expo SDK 56, focused on speed improvements, like faster Android cold start times and a polished default starter app. The introduction of "Observe," an open-source library for tracking real performance metrics in production, was a significant announcement, offering insights into user experiences across different devices and networks. The conference concluded with a session by Seth Webster, who highlighted the transformative potential of React Native and Expo, making mobile app development more accessible and efficient for individual developers.

Expo SDK 56 introduces significant improvements to the native module infrastructure on Apple platforms by enabling Swift to communicate directly with JSI, eliminating the need for the previous Objective-C++ intermediary layer. This change simplifies the call stack, accelerates call performance, and enhances ease of use by allowing Swift to import C++ headers directly, thus mirroring the JSI's ownership semantics with type-safe Swift APIs. The new architecture, which aligns Swift Concurrency with React Native's existing threading model, results in a substantial performance boost, particularly in asynchronous operations, making the Expo Module path faster than React Native's Turbo Modules in specific benchmarks. The update also involves prebuilt binary distribution to manage compile times and introduces the expo-modules-jsi package for iOS, tvOS, and macOS, while a separate Kotlin compiler plugin addresses Android improvements, all supported by significant contributions from AI in code coverage and testing.

Integrating native code with React Native applications is simplified by Expo modules, particularly with the introduction of inline-modules and the expo-type-information package in SDK 56. These updates address previous challenges such as creating package boilerplate and manually maintaining TypeScript interfaces that match native ones in Swift and Kotlin. Inline modules allow developers to write Swift and Kotlin code directly within their project's structure, streamlining the process and reducing overhead. The expo-type-information package further eases the development workflow by automatically generating TypeScript interfaces from Swift modules, using the SourceKitten tool to parse Swift files. This package includes a CLI tool that handles type generation and allows for the efficient creation of TypeScript files corresponding to Swift modules. Despite these enhancements, some limitations persist, such as file naming constraints, language and platform support currently restricted to Swift on macOS, and challenges in resolving certain native types due to SourceKitten's parsing limitations. However, these tools represent a significant step toward more seamless native code integration for React Native developers.