Mobile Devs Hate Servers. Expo Wants To Fix That.
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ม.ค. 2024
- Expo Version 50 has me really hyped. All mobile devs need to think about servers more, regardless of if they're on React Native, Swift, Objective C, Kotlin, Java, or even Flutter.
API routes are just the start - wait til you see what we have planned for UploadThing ;)
Expo V50 blog post: expo.dev/changelog/2023/12-12...
(Also - yes you can use this with both Vercel and tRPC. Very hyped about that)
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S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏
I've been building mobile apps for 8 years now and I can't see this taking off at all for anyone who isn't already doing react native. There's no path to on-boarding mobile devs to using web dev tools. Going from complete IDE integration with build and deploy, to making a bowl of spaghetti of loosely related build steps with different CLI tools feels like going back a decade.
I don't really get it. Why the hell do you have to do this. It's way easier and clear to just make REST API and access from web, app or from mars if you want. Same thing without all these gimmicky looking stuff. What is the real benefit here?
And i hate expo
I don’t understand why people keep pushing react native & expo, a11y just suck, your are months or years behind from native development since you need to wait for the community to implement the latest OS features in react native, debugging is a pain in the ass
I don't know if I really agree with the "mobile devs have a disdain for servers" take. I've been professionally developing mobile apps for around 10 years now and the reason firebase is big is not only because it abstracts away a server but because it abstracts away a lot of pain points with stuff like cross platform push notifications, analytics, crash reporting, app distribution and authentication that we had to deal with in the past. Almost all mobile apps I have built still have a custom PHP/Java/TS server running somewhere as firebase alone is quite limiting and annoying to deal with for server stuff.
React Native must have emerged as an attempt to make mobile close to the web, however the limitations (which make it security) of the web mean that mobile can build things beyond the web.
Mobile devs did not get as much hate though.
Expo added tailwind support? Very cool and deserves a video
For those who do not understand the point, this is about shared codebases. It's the idea that you have everything in one place. Your entities and contracts all from a single file so in the need of changes you do it once and it reflects everywhere
Problem I see with trying to get mobile Devs to care about the server is that servers cost money. If you're just creating an app 90% of the time you don't need a server.
I would love a video about Tailwind officially being in Expo! I have an app styled with Nativewind, but it didn't support all classes, such as "gap" and some text-styles; I had to use a separate style={{gap: 8}} for components that needed a gap. Better support would be phenominal!
This is amazing! It's cool that we are a step closer to RSC in mobile, but currently it doesn't really solve the problem of api versioning. Might as well build the api in GO or NextJS imo. But still very good first step.
I learn alot from your videos honestly. I'm really excited to learn react native with all these features I've seen from expo!
This is definitely something to keep an eye on, looks really cool 😮
Been doing Android and ios dev for 11 years. Its so specialized, i don't see this happening.
Likewise +1 to the native Tailwind stuff inside of Expo! We have a production app using rntwc which works very nicely, but are in the process of upgrading to Expo 50. Thanks for all this content!
I’m prototyping an Expo rewrite of my mobile app now… was about 40% ported to Ionic from the mobile app but I think dealing with the pain of pivoting the stack we use up front to another framework is worth it in the long run for the Expo Go DX alone especially now that Tailwind support is solid, and especially with these new backend features too.
Another important thing to note is you actually can test your backend as you write it without the need to deploy it first, since you cannot connect to localhost when running expo app in development (or at least we didnt find a way). That was the exact painpoint we had when developing a mobile app with hasura backend a while ago. Even the simplest change in backend meant waiting few minutes for the backend to deploy, and only then you could see what bugs you made this time
being primarily a web dev, i would just throw up a lambda fn behind API Gateway via sst/serverless framework to handle mobile app endpoints. this for sure makes that easier since ive also grown accustomed to just using whatever api-route integration a lot of frameworks have built in these days. awesome stuff!
defo gonna use this on my next project