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Throughout this course, we built React Native apps and I really want to emphasize this,

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we built React Native apps but we built them with a tool called expo and as you saw throughout this

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course, expo mostly get out of our way but it made building these apps way simpler.

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The setup process is simple, you can test it on your real device without any special configuration neither,

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you can easily add native modules and you have a huge catalog of built-in native modules and so on. So developing

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React Native apps with the help of expo is really easy and therefore my recommended way of doing it. Now

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there can be reasons why you might want to build an app without expo,

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for one you must not forget that expo of course works such that you have the expo client on your real

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device or also on the simulator of course, there we also in the end installed the expo client, so this

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app on the device and your app kind of gets loaded into that client. Now you still will be able to publish

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a standalone app as you learned, so you can still publish an app which you upload to the app stores where

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people don't need to install the client but this published app will in the end kind of include that app

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wrapper, so it will be a standalone app where people don't need to install the expo client app but the

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expo client app is part of your app you could say,

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so people indirectly install it if that makes sense.

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So you always have this wrapper and therefore one reason for not using expo but could be that you want

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to get rid of that wrapper because as you might imagine, this wrapper whilst still giving you a native

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app and whilst still giving you the benefits of your views being compiled to native views, whilst

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all of that is the case, this wrapper of course adds a little bit of size to your app, your app gets bigger.

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It probably also gets a bit slower because of that extra wrapper, though

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I still want to emphasize you get a native compiled app, right?

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Your views still are compiled to native code so you don't lose that,

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it's not like Ionic where Ionic use a native app as a wrapper for a web app,

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that's not what's happening here,

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still you have that overhead.

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So one reason for not using expo might be that you want to get rid of that extra wrapper, another reason

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could be that you need some native device functionality outside of what we used in the native feature

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module that isn't included in expo,

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so some feature which you just can't add with the help of expo and then you're stuck. If you need

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some feature that's not part of expo's of which you can't find here,

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then you can't add it to a React Native app built with expo, there's no way for that. You can't write

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your own native code and connect it and you can't bring other third-party packages which tap into native

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device features, that's not supported in expo.

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So these could be two reasons for why you want to switch away - you want to get rid of that wrapper because

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every millisecond of performance matters to you and every kilobytes of size matters to you or because of

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a native feature that's missing.

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Now I will emphasize for most apps, both reasons probably don't apply because we're not talking about

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a huge performance hit,

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we're not talking about a super huge app which you would be getting, indeed it's very lean but still that

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might be a thing for some apps

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and the thing with the native modules which might be missing, there is so many included,

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chances are that you can built the app you want to build with what's included. But in case something

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is missing, you can of course also build a React Native app and we can find that on the official docs

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too without expo.

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Now let me dive into the alternatives you have.