Expo

Prague is buzzing. Impressive developer scene here. It was great to spend time with the community and with the team at STRV - they are bringing Expo into their book of fantastic clients. We appreciate them hosting a meetup, a hackathon, and lots of strategy conversations. Keith Kurak, Joe Ryan, Seth Webster, and Samantha Wen are already looking forward to the next Europtrip in May. Vojtech Novak, David Mokos, Adam Zvada and Kryštof Woldřich thank you for being Expo's European eyes and ears.

⏲️ Android builds on EAS are now around 50% faster. We just shipped Gradle caching for Android builds on EAS Build. Task outputs are stored and reused between builds, so when a task's inputs haven't changed, the result is served from cache instead of being recomputed. This is especially effective for projects with many native modules, where the same tasks repeat across each module and can all be served from cache. ◆ Around 50% reduction in build times based on what we've seen so far ◆ Cache keys are generated from your package manager lock file hash, so the cache updates automatically as dependencies change ◆ Stacks with our compiler cache (ccache), which already accelerates C/C++ recompilation Enable it by setting 𝙴𝙰𝚂_𝙶𝚁𝙰𝙳𝙻𝙴_𝙲𝙰𝙲𝙷𝙴=𝟷 in your account environment variables or in 𝚎𝚊𝚜.𝚓𝚜𝚘𝚗. The first build generates the cache, subsequent builds restore from it. If you're shipping React Native at scale, faster Android builds compound quickly across a team. Link to the changelog from Mustafa Abban below ↓

Claude Code raises the floor. Expo raises the ceiling. Put them together with all the Expo Skills: https://lnkd.in/gjykW5st

We work closely with PrizePicks and they just told us about this Senior React Native engineer role for OGX team. You'd work on developer experience, build tooling, CI/CD, app health, and big projects that fundamentally shift how the org builds and ships. This is a massive role. Check it out:

You're only as fast as your CI pipeline. Everyone wants to ship faster now. We all have a handful of agents running at a time - we all have more code to ship. But your CI pipeline needs to get faster too. If you combine Fingerprint + Repack you can speed up your pipeline by 80%. To be very clear: this is the use case being adopted by all the most ambitious Expo customers - most of whom had no interest in changing their CI Pipeline when we initially asked. Check this out. Let us know if you have any questions. https://lnkd.in/gzwMWBCm

When you ship a polished UI, the animation library you reach for usually fades into the background. Until it doesn't. App&Flow just published a detailed benchmark study on per-frame UI thread cost across React Native animation approaches: react-native-ease, Reanimated (Shared Values and CSS), and RN Animated. The most useful takeaway is not which one is fastest. It's a clear answer to a question most teams never sit down to think through: when does the choice actually matter? ◆ Long-running animations like skeleton loaders and ambient backgrounds ◆ Lists with many animated items on screen at once ◆ Low-end devices, where small per-frame overhead compounds ◆ Short one-shot transitions, where any library works fine A useful detail that's easy to miss: debug builds significantly inflate animation overhead. If your numbers look alarming during development, reproduce in a release build before changing anything. Worth a read if you care about frame budgets in React Native. Full report from Janic Duplessis in the comment below ↓

Don't pay this bill. The invoice you get from your CI vendor is not the total cost of your pipeline. There is also operational overhead, productivity loss, and deployment lag to add to the bill. We know nobody wants to change their CI pipeline. If it's working, why change it right? Expo can reduce these DevOps costs by 80%. This allows engineers to focus on building features rather than managing infrastructure. Nobody should change their CI to save a few dollars. You change your CI to fundamentally improve the pace and quality of how your organization ships software. https://lnkd.in/gPaqvWRy

Seth Webster is on 🔥 In the last couple weeks Seth has been on stage (& in studio) in China, Japan, NYC, and Miami. Next stop: Prague. Since officially announcing the The React Foundation and his role as Chief Developer Advocate at Expo - Seth has been busy bringing Expo and React into organizations all over the world. In Prague this week he's speaking alongside Joe Ryan, David Mokos and Adam Zvada - then he's co-hosting a hackathon with STRV. This is a unique opportunity to meet one of the real pioneers of modern web and mobile development - and actually get his input on your work. Here are links to the meetup and the hackathon: • https://luma.com/STRVTalks • https://lnkd.in/g8s96iuP

Sometimes there's no npm package for what your app needs. You have to go native. We're running a workshop at AppJS at the end of May to walk you through writing custom native modules with the Expo Modules API. The session will be lead by Hassan Khan and Jacob Clausen. We'd love to see you there: https://lnkd.in/dJCjqJ84

Your PR builds don't need to recompile native code every time. Fingerprint produces a single deterministic hash of every native dependency and configuration in your project. With that hash, your CI can answer real questions: were native files modified, which ones, and is this JS change safe to deploy to an existing release with EAS Update. Repack takes an existing binary, injects a new JavaScript bundle and metadata, and skips the entire native compilation step. Think of it as a very high-level cache: fingerprint is the key, the full native build is the cached value, and only the JS bundle gets swapped. What that means in practice, from one real app: ◆ Full native build: ~23 minutes ◆ Repack: ~5 minutes ◆ ~78% reduction in CI time, about 18 minutes back per run Most PRs only change JavaScript. Most CI pipelines still pay for a full native rebuild anyway. This is the fix. Full writeup, including the EAS Workflows YAML: https://lnkd.in/gjduxjAt