Why Expo Remains the King

The Mobile Development Challenge

As businesses race to deliver seamless mobile experiences, development teams face critical questions: How can we build high-quality applications faster? How do we maintain consistency across platforms without doubling our engineering resources? How do we respond quickly to market feedback and security concerns?

These questions have guided my journey as a React Native developer building applications spanning fintech, retail, and messaging domains. Having delivered projects like Sense Chat (encrypted blockchain messaging), Tractor Supply (retail mobile app with AR features), and LegalAgent (AI legal assistant), I've consistently found one solution that addresses these challenges: Expo.

Why Expo Dominates Mobile Development

In today's landscape where development velocity and cost efficiency are paramount, Expo stands unrivaled. Its single codebase approach delivers significant advantages:

• 30-40% reduction in development costs by eliminating separate iOS and Android teams
• 50% faster time-to-market for feature deployment across platforms
• Streamlined maintenance with fewer platform-specific bugs
• Enhanced resource allocation focused on product features rather than platform differences

This is impactful for any team that wants to move fast—from startups to enterprises. While startups may feel this pressure most acutely, all development teams benefit from accelerated delivery timelines and optimized resource allocation.

The Technical Edge: Expo + React Native

Expo extends React Native with a comprehensive suite of tools that eliminate complexity in building, testing, and deploying applications:

• Over-the-Air (OTA) updates: Deploy fixes and features instantly without app store approval cycles
• Cloud builds: Eliminate local machine configuration and cross-OS development environments
• Integrated CI/CD: EAS (Expo Application Services) provides automated testing and release pipelines
• Native API access: Integrate camera, notifications, biometrics without custom native code
• Production-tested modules: Comprehensive package library for media, authentication, and device sensors
• Consistent updates: Active ecosystem with thorough documentation and community support

These capabilities allow development teams to focus engineering time on product features rather than toolchain configuration and maintenance.

React Native: The Foundation

At its core, React Native bridges frontend web development with native mobile performance:

• Faster development cycles compared to pure native development
• Single codebase for iOS and Android platforms
• Strong integration with existing JavaScript/React workflows
• Extensive ecosystem of libraries and contributors

React Native's maturity is evidenced by its adoption among industry leaders across sectors.

Companies Building with React Native

The framework's enterprise readiness is proven by its implementation across major companies:

Financial & Cryptocurrency

• Coinbase: Successfully transitioned from native to React Native in 2021
• Robinhood: Stock trading platform leveraging React Native for real-time market data
• Binance and Kraken: Leading exchanges serving millions of daily traders
• Bloomberg: Financial information with real-time market data delivery

Web3 & Crypto Wallets

• MetaMask Mobile, Rainbow Wallet, and Ledger Live: Leading crypto wallets
• Argent: Smart contract wallet for Ethereum and Layer 2 networks
• Aave, 1inch, and Uniswap: DeFi protocols with mobile interfaces

Consumer Platforms

• Facebook/Instagram: As React Native's creators, they use it extensively
• Discord: Cross-platform communication for millions of daily users
• Tesla: Vehicle control mobile application
• Uber Eats and Walmart: Customer-facing mobile experiences
• Shopify: Merchant mobile application

AI Platforms

• Duolingo: Gamified language learning with GPT-4 tutor ("Duolingo Max") and adaptive AI lessons, 500M+ downloads worldwide
• Amazon Photos: Unlimited photo backup with AI-powered face/object recognition and smart albums, tens of millions of active users
• Character.AI: Chat and roleplay with AI characters or create your own, 20M+ monthly active users
• Be My Eyes: Blind and low-vision assistance app combining human volunteers with GPT-4 vision ("Be My AI"), 7M+ registered users
• Wysa: AI mental health chatbot for CBT, journaling, and stress relief, 5M+ users with 4.9★ App Store rating

These implementations demonstrate that React Native with Expo isn't just viable—it's the preferred solution for companies prioritizing development efficiency and cross-platform consistency.

Real-World Impact: Cross-Platform Development

For most mobile applications—including content platforms, fintech solutions, social networks, productivity tools, crypto wallets, and marketplaces—Expo's unified approach delivers measurable benefits:

Development & Deployment Excellence

Expo excels by enabling genuine cross-platform code sharing while dramatically simplifying deployment. In full-stack architectures, teams leverage:

• Shared business logic across platforms
• Unified styling with NativeWind/Tailwind
• Consistent TypeScript interfaces
• Components that render directly in browsers via React Native Web
• Authentication flows that work everywhere

This unified approach extends to deployment through Expo Application Services (EAS), a key component of modern mobile CI/CD:

• Cloud-based build pipelines eliminate local Xcode/Android Studio requirements
• Automated certificate and provisioning profile management
• Efficient app store submissions and OTA updates
• Production monitoring with one-click rollbacks

From Experience: Business-Critical Impact of OTA Updates

My experience with Make Sense Labs highlighted Expo's critical business value. While developing Sense.chat, a secure messaging app with blockchain integration, the OTA update capability reduced our security patch deployment from 7+ days (including app store reviews) to under 30 minutes, substantially improving our ability to respond to vulnerabilities and user feedback.

Coinbase's engineering team reported similar benefits in their transition to React Native, noting that OTA updates allowed them to maintain consistent security standards with significantly reduced operational overhead.

When to Consider Alternatives

While React Native excels for most mobile applications, some scenarios might require alternative approaches:

Despite Expo's advantages, certain specific requirements might warrant alternative approaches:

• Advanced 3D or Graphics: Applications requiring complex 3D rendering, AR/VR experiences, or intensive graphics processing
• Custom Native Modules: Projects needing very specific native functionality not covered by Expo's API
• Extremely Performance-Critical Operations: Applications where every millisecond counts (high-frequency trading, real-time multiplayer games)
• Legacy Integration Requirements: Projects that must deeply integrate with existing native codebases

In these scenarios, teams can use Expo's "bare workflow" (providing more native control while retaining some Expo benefits) or pursue fully native development. However, these cases represent a minority of mobile applications.

Final Thoughts

After years building mobile applications across domains from messaging to retail, I've observed Expo's evolution into an enterprise-grade platform handling millions of daily users. The economics are compelling: a single engineering team can deliver features across iOS and Android simultaneously, while still achieving native performance where it matters most.

For teams already working with TypeScript and React in frontend development, Expo provides the most economical path into mobile—enabling truly cross-platform architecture without doubling development teams.

Whether developing a secure messaging app like Sense.chat, a retail application with AR features like Tractor Supply, or an AI-powered legal assistant, Expo remains the king of mobile development in 2025 for one simple reason: it delivers superior business outcomes through technical efficiency.