New Expo Tools for React Native Developers | Launch Party Recap with Aron Berezkin

thank you hey everyone what's up welcome to a new stream I think we're live um at least that's yeah yeah now the fixture comes finally and there's always a delay between YouTube and uh the stream and for everyone tuning in you're gonna see something special so I gotta how do I put my hands like down here in the corner we have a special guest today so today's guest is no I will give it a try Aaron bereskin uh yeah from the strv company joining us to cover the latest news about Expo um Aaron thanks for joining me definitely thanks for organizing it and let's do it police everyone in the chat if you're already tuning in uh let me know if you can hear both me and Aaron that would be great because we had technical issues up front so I can definitely hear him and he can hear me I just want to make sure that everyone can hear uh the two of us so let me know in the chat yeah thank you Nick Nick is by the way I think the only person who's a member of my YouTube channel so I and a good feature like last week thank you Nick for following just a quick preview before Aaron can introduce himself or everyone tuning in later we're covering the Expo launch event in this live stream or in this video if you watch it later uh that I happened last week on August 8th um right here yeah I have now new brush tool to paint on my screen I'm going to definitely try this out many times today and there were some cool updates to Expo to a as to Expo orbits sequel light plug in so I think we're going to have a lot to talk about for an hour and Aaron was or will be a guest on my podcast as well the Rocketship podcast make sure you check it out if you haven't done so far but that episode is not yet out so Aaron maybe introduce yourself and let everyone know who you are and why you're here yeah hey everyone I'm Aaron burskin I'm a senior Rec native developer uh currently Contracting for sdrv sdre is a digital agency based in Prague with clients all over the world mostly in the US and yeah I've been building react native applications for some time and looking forward to share some good insights yeah if you look at strv the stuff you're doing is pretty awesome so I can already give a little spoiler in the podcast that I did with Aaron we're talking also about an app develop for Arnold Schwarzenegger so that's something he worked on uh and then I might have used that for a little clickbaity title Aaron yeah sorry it's a good good clickbait definitely I mean that's how YouTube works so 17 people already in stream let me know what you're tuning in from today I'm pretty sure so we have Nick Jon Philippe welcome Malek uh Aaron yeah hey to you again uh let me know where you're coming in blind race in the house as well that's good to hear so the the core of the fans is already in place but I feel like we already have some some more people tuning in um I also invited Cedric from Expo but I think he is traveling so Cedric if you hear this uh thanks for making awesome stuff um but let me quickly put this out to join us live talking about Expo uh actually join talking about Expo with Aaron Burris what's your what's your Twitter handle uh it's like my full name I don't understand uh I'll run I'll run I'll run it's hard to find you I don't know Twitter sometimes gives me like really strange recommendations I kind of know the name of a person but it's still like messing this up um so has anyone else tuned into the Expo stuff last week I must admit I haven't been following it too closely like kind of late I I caught the news and saw that people were like celebrating the new stuff around did you follow it closely I did follow it um like lunch week basically it's a great like marketing strategy how get how to get everyone to talk about your product um so it was really hard to miss on Twitter basically we also with my colleagues we say now we got the email Whenever there was something um basically released and then we kind of discussed in our like internal slack uh and yeah there are quite a few things and if you like bundle them together maybe they are not like big in nature individually but together uh it's very interesting and um it looks also like a kind of a road map because not everything that was released is like a fully fledged product yet most of them are maybe some proof of Concepts and Alpha releases but it's also a good way to look where like Expo is heading and what everything thing they're considering so that they can improve the developer experience yeah I think I I read through everything and some part is like yeah I can't see the value because I don't reuse it really uh but behind some things I definitely smell the potential for something big definitely so um let's maybe jump into the first one and just hey Melvin uh thanks and hey it's pretty cool ray to hear that you finally built your first react native application with exponent that you had a great experience um by the way yeah greetings to Nigeria once again Nigeria is always strong in my live streams I think you're having a great Tech scene in Nigeria I know some people from there definitely yeah so greetings to Nigeria and also on personal note so earlier this morning I looked up call stick which is I think another very common uh or very popular company for react native and they're hosting the react native EU conference um I'm coming by the way if you are coming oh you're coming I was considering but I'm not a speaker and the tickets are just like I don't have a company that pays for the ticket so it's quite expensive uh but shame on me today I learned that Rock Club or I'm not sure how to pronounce it is actually its own City like I I thought this was English for Warsaw um careful careful Simon yeah I I completely I I was sitting in the car with my wife and she was also like let's look this up maybe it's an own City and I'm like wow this is actually a beautiful city it looks exactly like Munster where I live with like the churches and the marketplace uh have you been there it looks really cool yeah actually I I have a Polish friend from studies in Scotland and he invited me for a wedding close to verse love so I took the bus from Prague it's just four hours not really far uh and a really beautiful city I definitely recommend everyone visiting and I bet that's the reason also why Goldstock is uh basically hiring some great Engineers because the city is just lovely and I bet they have good rents so they can afford like super cool office like sdrv and yeah looking forward to be there soon actually in two weeks yeah yeah it's in it's in about two weeks hi Kier hi Krishna I'm from India um yeah Rock Club I still need to uh improve my pronunciation but giving my best so we don't have sound effects yet because I'm I I guess at least [Music] I don't know if this still works I don't think this is coming through that's a Pity uh but we have the launch week roll out for EAS update let's talk about that first um I will try to summarize what this means and you're gonna correct me if I'm wrong so uh I think this is about the Expo application Services which allow you to build your react native applications in the cloud which also allow to do over-the-air updates so for everyone who's not familiar with that um usually you have to submit a new app to IOS and Android if you want to do an update but with over the air updates you can just like skip that review process and yes that is allowed to some degree um and with this Improvement you can say like hey please only release my new update to 50 20 of my user base did I get that basically right yeah you got to try it um and the reason why they are doing it because over the air updates they're so powerful you can like roll out a feature like to users like basically with click of a button no no store review you can fix the bug like immediately for so many users but it's so powerful tool but there are so many things that can go wrong with over the air updates um maybe just some starter for everyone to get on the same page um in react native word we have JavaScript layer and we have the native layer basically our IOS and Android folder and this JavaScript it's just a bundle you know like it can have like several megabytes or a bit more if you have some assets but what you can theoretically do you can like start the application ask the server hey is there like new JavaScript bundle and if there is you can basically download the bundle and put it under application and basically if you want it you can like change your I don't know restaurants app to Uber or something because like this what you can do with over the air updates but having this uh like native and JavaScript layer you have to make sure that both layers are compatible so if you have application in production and you start developing a new feature and let's say you install a new dependency let's say Expo location to get current location of the user so you have some like a JavaScript method that you use to call this native epic native API and if you send it to the users you know that are already having this application but they don't have explo location as a native dependency then they see the button hey let's get current location you know like so you can like Center the map for example around the user and then they are calling native API that doesn't exist in their like application and unfortunately in our mobile development world what happens is like your application crashes and yeah really bad experience at least they don't see undefined is not a function yeah so that's why what they are probably trying to do is to make people use these over-the-air updates but also have some safety because before this like uh like partial rollout it would be like click a button and release it to everyone and hopefully you manage the compatibility correctly uh and if not well then everyone gets like bad experience and maybe if you were back fixing you you caused more harm than good uh so it's really tricky tricky feature and these this rollouts probably help you to roll it out to 10 check your Sentry for logs if everything is working as it's supposed to and then roll it out to the remaining 90 to get the 100 yeah I guess that makes sense to just roll it out you really like yeah a tiny percentage of your users to see it I I took a little spicy note on it which said so you ship your untested code to only 50 of the users and hope for the best like it's it's no excuse for not testing your code right um and then just chipping and hoping for the best so you should still like do all your best to test your code up front but I guess there are sometimes just things that just yeah you just can't test like you just don't experience it I think it's also the process of releasing over-the-air update because if you do it from your local machine like you write es update in your terminal it's gonna bundle environment variables that you have locally which is probably your deaf environment so you know system basically to do it and like input all the like production environment variables or have it live somewhere like in a GitHub action where you can like get the GitHub Secrets uh for the production environment and then you know you are safe and you're releasing like the correct environment uh so that's just one of the things I I won't be so unbelievable excited to roll out and over the air update from my machine like to potentially thousands of users have you done that before like just from your just one button click you rolled it out to 10 000 units I mean I don't know if 10 000 but I did it this way but it is like it requires lots of like I would say Precision you know you have to remember like what environment variables you need to like basically set up in your local machine uh but obviously like more senior developer they will not go this way they will prepare some like pipeline or script uh because it's it's just too risky I was also always having the assumption that you usually use this from your EAS account like from the dashboard and then you would click like use this commit or something and then uh push the update how it should be well basically it has to be kind of triggered from your GitHub repository because um like you can like let's say select different code you know different branch or whatever you want to roll out so it's not like um like you can connect probably es Expo now these days with your GitHub repository uh and like deploy let's say some main branch or something but over the air updates they give you like um this option basically you can go back to the history because this goes back to the compatibility thing imagine you have a bug in a version one 1.1 and 1.2 yeah so three versions you need to bug fix and you need to back plug fix basically them the way that you go back make the bug fix and release it go back to the other one make the bug fix and release it and if I'm talking about a version I'm talking about runtime version uh it's something that lives in your Expo config at config and that's basically the way how to manage compatibility you should basically change it always when you install a new dependency because we are this runtime version you can determine who will actually receive the update so that doesn't happen with the example with exploitation when like version one gets updated for version 1.2 because you didn't use the runtime version to change it um so it's really tricky it's really tricky yeah I'm talking about it I can imagine like the listeners like they're probably a bit scared to use it yeah but yeah from everything that you said I get the sense that it's quite a crucial part of your app rollout strategy or app managing strategy and therefore I I now get why this feature is definitely um great for for companies using it where I wanted to go where's my where's my overview uh ah there's the launch overview so let's get into the second one um this is probably a short one it's also related to over-the-air updates and the new thing is that there's no use updates API so a custom hook which you can use to check if there is an update for your app available that you download it like just more granular control over the whole thing so you can like display what they had here in this cool image up here with this update available and reload functionality I assume this stuff wasn't possible before is that correct so is this the new part uh in my view there's not much new in this particular hook uh if you go to Expo updates documentation you will actually find that there is uh there are like lots of methods and lots of data you can access from export updates library and you can probably do lots of what the use updated hook does yourself but I think the problem is again that people just have trouble with over the air updates and expo here is trying to make it easier for them like wait is update available is update pending yeah you you just kind of clearly know like what's happening uh and that's that's the purpose of this hook [Music] in the expert updates documentation there is basically something similar I guess but you have to do a bit of more work on your side uh how do you fetch the update when do you trigger it do you force users to do it or do you just like suggest it as we saw in the screenshot uh usually the sidebar on the right like there is actually lots of you can access um and yeah yeah I think that that's that was all uh before the latest changes or yes uh okay so yeah okay that means really not a lot new but then yeah okay that ends then I mean it's really nice to have this hook because it just kind of simplifies it for everyone uh it kind of also converges how people use the library so it's easier maybe to bug fix because people are not doing too much like custom stuff with the library uh so I think again it's a strategy how to make people use over-the-air updates a bit more because they're really powerful it's a privilege for us to react native developers that we can actually use them yes I don't think that native developers have this privilege um even though I read maybe they're trying of something similar I actually don't know if anyone in the chat is aware of something similar for iOS or Android please let me know because I know for flutter this has always been the debate for flutter this is also not yet working I think they are cooking something but it's definitely not working um for Cordova or capacitor there are solutions because it's also just like a webview bundle that you uh replace over the air so that's not a big deal but I haven't heard about this from native apps that's right uh why does it always take me on the back button to all posts I want to go back here oh oh yeah now comes the most important part of this presentation uh the the biggest news the the biggest most important feature from the Expo launch party that Aaron and I are really super super excited about for the extra application Services um there's really not a lot to say about this are you using it at your company or is any of your clients using this or oh might use it so we do mostly like Greenfield projects and I guess for someone to get to like Enterprise customer of Expo it would probably take a few years uh for the project to kind of grow and mature uh but we have some like um basically clients with uh applications that lives there in the app store for years you know and it's a already corporate company you know so they need to have control who can actually access Expo dashboard or who can like or you who you can basically kick out immediately if they like quit the company or something so all this SSO probably improves for these customers because they have to care about security much more than startups or us like independent developers you know uh so I can see how it makes sense for the bigger companies uh but not the majority probably of Expo users yeah more exciting news that we want to talk about so number four on the list is Expo orbit this was actually the um Twitter threat or news that got the most likes and shares and something and people were genuinely uh excited about this so I installed this it's a tool that you can download from GitHub as far as I know yeah you can just go here and download and install it it gives you a little icon so on my Mac I actually don't it's just it's just MEC right sorry Windows User it's just Meg just get a Mac for a development um there is now a little icon at the top bar which basically opens this menu where you can select a build or start your devices or simulators now I previously used the tool and I don't know if they appended this paragraph I feel like that wasn't in the first draft of that one news so I used this tool called mini Sim previously because it was mentioned in a newsletter a few weeks ago which basically gives you the same functionality to start one of your simulators that was actually a cool cool feature of this mini Sim tool but on top in Expo orbit you can now install build from EAS uh you can launch a snack in your simulator I actually haven't done that before um I feel like this could be pretty cool you can list and launch and write emulators and install launch apps from local files so because I don't have friends and I don't work at a company I can't really launch the build of somebody else but for you as a company does Expo orbit um fix a problem or help you develop faster I don't think it exists any problem um but it definitely is a great utility and I feel this is just like the beginning for Expo I actually install it and I'm really surprised how nicely it works so now I don't know did you install it by the way or yeah I did but if I open it I can't show it right now because my screen is capturing just one portion of my oh I see screen well so it's nice it's like MacBook app so it's always like in your hands and then there is basically a button where you can go to select build from EAS this will navigate you to your EAS builds dashboard and then if you uh you have to also toggle in EAS settings that you want to use this orbit functionality it's experimental and if you do it if you toggle it on then it will give you extra button for each build which will say launch with orbit and if you do launch with orbit it will automatically download it and install it on your simulator so you don't have to do kind of like a manual step if you have like development build you download it then you have to drag it to simulator or emulator where can I enable this setting to show it in Expo orbit uh it probably is in your profile settings try your avatar on the top right not showing any projects I do have projects yeah okay I'm going to figure that one up try user settings uh you had it there no no go back to your profile yeah user settings no no you see it settings you mean edit profile I think it's user settings you saw it well let me let me go there I think that's one we're probably a bit timely late so oh yeah that's right uh yeah here it is experiments and then Expo orbit in my uh setting so I'm going to enable this definitely and then on the latest version of GitHub orbit from Expo and then I can probably use it yeah I can select one thing uh yeah well I probably haven't figured out the whole chain of things I need to do but I won't do a live debugging of them um so yeah you say it's easier to install my builds with orbit and like really easier I mean slightly easier like fewer steps but as I say like this is the beginning I I can see how the tool can grow they can add maybe some like history of the development build you download it and maybe some more metadata uh because like if you are developing in a team and then one gets a feature maybe to do like subscriptions you have to like let's say use react native purchases or like Revenue get and because your dependency basically changed now everyone needs to like once you merge to development and everyone starts using the development Branch you need everyone to basically start using a new Expo Dev client and rather than having everyone individually basically doing the build on the local machine what you can do is when you install this dependency you just trigger EAS build uh for like development for Android iOS and then just tell your code is hey I have a new dependency use this expertise and built for your local machine and they can just start working immediately they don't have to like hope that their setup is correct you know like uh building Androids building iOS and they can use my build and with orbit you know like they do it with few clicks uh and it's really nice especially for junior developers to get oriented you know talked about it on our podcast but it's it's quite frustrating for senior developers to spend four hours debugging the build machine you know like for the general developer so this way I can just distribute a development client build and they are basically just dragging it over to their simulator or with export orbit basically just selecting it and it's going to launch automatically it's really really nice yeah I might have to check this out and see how fast it actually like launches my stuff um and with my builds as well so I usually do like local builds I got time so I trigger my Eis build locally I'm a local boy and and then I just get a coffee and hope everything works um but yeah I'm going to try that out I definitely installed it and I recommend everyone else to install it as well uh but I'm also I marked this before so I'm also excited about this launch snack project in your simulator with the link because I still think like how can I help people better when they have problems um so maybe this helps to like I can just say hey give me a snack or give me like others say give me a stick Blitz or give me uh whatever kind of sandbox and then I can just quickly check out their stuff um we will see how that expands I'm pretty sure these are not the only and the last functionalities um and it's kind of exciting to have this like companion tool for Expo I mean they have the Expo Go app which is already incredible but I really like when they Venture into new stuff and I mean we could sit here in one year and they just discontinued orbit because it didn't work out or something um but it's always exciting to see to see the beginning of something new yeah and we should mention like the main inspiration was uh top hat from Shopify uh there was an article on the Shopify blog uh about it actually I never heard about it I heard about it until exported was released um but yeah it's great yeah it's really inspiring yeah it's great that like the companies you know they can Inspire from each other uh in the react native ecosystem like Microsoft is doing so much you know with rnx it's called you know like lots of like toolkits for react native applications so one inspires the other and yes the whole Community basically benefits yes agree agree all right we have the first four covered um we're getting into the next four Folly fully customizable Builds on EAS build um this one's interesting because as I said I'm not really the target audience of this stuff of a like complicated Cloud builds like when I release an app I do it locally usually um but this as far as I understand uh helps to like write your own build steps and run them with Expo what I found pretty cool is that they also um that's I think here uh that they also expose their underlying features functions whatever like EAS check out these are the steps that Expo is actually running when you do an EAS build so check out use npm install pre-will and you can use them you can combine them with your own stuff and put in other features like I'm not going to use this of course um but it could eventually replace lrci systems I guess so now my question for you who is working in real applications are you actually having something like a Jenkins or other CI systems anymore is this still cool in 2023 or are you just relying on on the Expo application builds and I mean this this here it looks cool so Expo is running a test suit or something but I don't know what people really use this in reality uh like we use GitHub actions definitely like for linting you know so some typescript check and then basically for the pipeline releases building the application and submitting it so for us actually having just that and EAS is sufficient uh we we don't really need to like go into the individual build steps which is so nice actually that I don't need to do it you know like if you don't I'm so grateful for EAS that they do just enough for me to make it work totally seamlessly but I can see like not everyone has um let's say that simple let's say setup like we have or maybe they didn't use ears before you know maybe their pipeline is a bit more complicated there there is some custom logic and they want to migrate to EAS and having some customizability on the EAS site will help them to do that uh because you know now we are developing mostly like Expo applications we are so lucky you know like we can do the deaf clients native dependencies everything but there are many many react native apps that just don't use Expo because they were built before EAS and Expo Dev client so if they want to like slowly migrate to Expo having like good build system like EAS they might need to do some customization at first so that they don't lose some like important build step and eventually you know like um they can use EAS you can run linting and this kind of stuff on yes I I think it should be done with before you run EAS but talking about like pricing yes it's now uh priced at flat rate of two dollars or four four dollars for faster builds uh therefore like the minutes now I guess our infinite yes so you can put in your build steps whatever you want now I'm just kidding I actually read they have to start considering this you know in their pricing uh because obviously if someone does custom built for 200 minutes it's not gonna be that's uh that's cheap for Expo I could I could bring up my own like serverless functions or something running from that build yeah anything um anyway but also like if I have a linter and I put it on ES build my question is if it fails on the linter and it was running is built am I charge the two dollars or not you know because I know yeah for big companies that pay like hundreds of thousands dollars for application is like almost nothing but for us like hobby projects you know developers uh it's it's mounting up you know so I'm curious how they're gonna approach it uh I think it will take some time for them to like figure out the pricing but they wanted to roll it out for the community to test basically to tell them what we need from the custom builds and it's going to be great product I I bet yeah I am pretty sure some companies some Enterprise companies will find a lot of value in it as you said it might help them to migrate or switch um so just like the rest it's not for everyone probably um just like I don't need SSO but so others might not need Expo orbit but the cool thing is it's a launch party and there's something in it for everyone and I think especially the last two are now probably the biggest items at least they were the biggest items on my list um let's get into them the first of the two is proof of concept Expo sqlite integration with CR SQL Lite so for everyone who's not aware of this if you build a native iOS or Android application there's usually a sqlite database bundle with your application that you can use mostly like a regular SQL database so it has less types I mean it has to be light otherwise the name would be confusing and you could just use it locally completely I've built some applications with that also that's a good point to say that if you want to learn more about this check out galaxies.dev I think I just released a course on SQL Lite just the other day let me check it out uh yeah we re-ramped our UI by the way a bit and here it is here's the new sqlite course in the essentials category uh we also have something on 10 stick query so really the latest stuff is in galaxies.dev and yes I do have a course on sqlite that I might expand then in the future on whatever Expo is doing there so I'm just dropping it here galaxies.dev check it out you actually get a little discount if you use the code uh help me out the code live stream I think the code is live stream then you get a discount at checkout for pro um coming back to the proof of concept I'm not entirely sure what this is about um and I know that we just quickly lost our run but now he's back uh here it is Peg um so I think in Aaron please help me on this I think they want to build something that makes it easier to sync your sqlite database in your application to an actual server so you can like potentially all of your users have their own sqlite database and they run changes on the database and then you eventually sync it back when those users come back online um I think this is a very complicated thing to achieve so that's probably why this article actually covers a lot of things that look yes question what interesting and challenging to me and this this is also not just about Expo or react native applications is it involves the server and running your own stuff on the server so what's your your take on this particular news feature yeah my take is uh again it's just for particle set of users and type of applications uh so I think what is powerful about it and what I understand from the demo is you can like easily sync many devices you know like take notion or something or just writing some notes uh on your mobile phone then you're writing on your desktop and then it kind of like merges all together I saw some like phrase uh no merge conflict or something like that uh synchronization uh and yeah that's actually good parallel it's something like GitHub you know like you're building your development Branch uh sorry feature blend Branch your colleague does the same thing then you merge the development but you have some conflict you know and GitHub or sorry git is like helping you like to merge the code together so I would look at this uh in a similar way it's some like very smart system how to merge uh like database changes into like one particle data source uh I haven't particularly used this type of technology so maybe there's some Innovation maybe not I'm not sure but what is powerful is obviously that this allows to build local first applications like something that is like offline as a default and then when the user you know like when they build like write something offline on their device then something on the desktop you know like it seamlessly merges together and um probably creates a nice experience so again for particular type of applications uh not for definitely everyone but you see like what Expo does they want to have like fingers in like all pies or how is the English phase you know like they if there is an opportunity they just take it you know like before everyone else and why not because the community eventually tells them hey this is great or this is not and they either iterate on it build it up or maybe someone takes over from the community yeah I mean I mean why not the answer would be money in time they spent on it that they could spend on something else but nonetheless if they can manage to bring up the time it's pretty cool um yeah what you said is interesting this local first app development that sticks out to me as well but the problem here that I had with this integration was that it mentions I should also use tiny bass which looks cool but honestly I have never heard about it before and then that was also another tool I should also use so I don't know how how realistic it is to use this and set this up like I feel already fancy if I use Firebase or Super Bass so I don't know how how open companies are too or maybe I like get this wrong and Tiny bites is actually like what uh what are the stars for GitHub 2.4 K Stars [Music] yeah well it's probably opportunity for demonstrate as well for the tiny base you know like it's probably a niche era in which uh they are really good at uh reactive data source so probably they they're close to react I think I saw some react UI like they offer um so maybe it makes sense for them uh let's see where it goes I'm looking forward to see some great demos from people because like our community is so creative and everyone is happy to share like what they built so it's only good let's see right and for everyone interested there's also a talk that they link to here on the app.js conf about local First State Management I have yet to watch this talk but I guess this would cover some ideas about local first architecture so recommend this as well and it was also by the way the other tool they used party kit so there were actually two tools involved like this tiny tiny base and party kit that made me feel like it's too much for me to handle today but yeah I mean it's clear it's it's not easy you know that's that's why when they are trying to kind of merge the tools together and give you guidance um and probably this fjs talk inspired this so they each it is in the background somewhere and asked Expo hey what do you want to like take it over or something uh it's just good you know but they have to educate people how to build these powerful applications and if if they manage to do it it's just good for the whole react native Community you know yes and one last thing that I found uh here was what did they say uh we plan to begin investing heavily in our SQL light binding so they definitely are interested in really investing into this so it shows Expo is committed to this and yeah we're gonna watch out for what comes next to SQL line and Expo which brings us to the last part which opens up a whole range of conversation topics afterwards and questions I might have so proof of concept Expo CLI Dev tools plugins um I in in short words what I understand about Expo debugging is that with Expo sdk49 it already got a lot easier so when you run npx Expo in your application then you just hit uh so here's my application I can just hit J and that usually brings up the development tools in the browser which with some problems here but it just gives you the usual web development debugging experience that was I mean for me it felt kind of natural I think for the react native world it was already a big thing and now they're doing more to somehow help people migrate away from Flipper so flipper is another tool for debugging direct applications I'm not super familiar with flipper yet and it sounds like it's getting deprecated so yeah you you definitely have to jump in and tell me what all of this is about and and what's happening to the dev tools and debugging with Expo yeah so flipper is basically if I understand it well from Facebook as well so it's part of react native it's bundled kind of like together so it's very seamless experience you don't have to toggle remote debugging or what was the button you know previously to launch uh some debugger so flipper just works which is nice uh you need Expo Dev client for it uh now flipper is actually part of Expo you can actually in Via export build properties config plugin enable it and the experience is very very seamless uh it gives you logs it gives you network access which is probably the most important and then they have this plugin system you know so one question about the network access if I now use the dev tools and the network tab I can also inspect like the traffic is this the same stuff I can see with flipper or desk flipper more it's like flipper more let's say more native if no no it's pretty much the same kind of thing uh but as you mentioned like this was impossible before Expo sdk49 to have it in the dev tools so you had to use either flipper or react native debugger or whatever works for you um so flipper was very seamless experience uh it has like a rich plug-in system which we will get into or like now is like you can write a plugin for flipper so Apollo client cash react query cache mnkv async storage to see like what data are on your device you could all see that there or maybe zushtan actions or Redux actions you could check it uh so flipper gave you like lots of control and well uh at some point uh I feel like they focused on react native but then they switched more like on focus on Native development Flipper on and overall on everything so I guess like the expectation from Philip River was high but the two didn't improve much I would say uh they improved UI maybe some stability um but not kind of anymore and by the way on my application when I turn on flipper uh I see like some memory League or something like the application gets really really slow so it's very painful for me to actually use it I don't know if it's my application or others have experience with that as well but I know that people didn't get big liking for like flipper and that's why we get you know Innovation from Expo hey let's use you know the tools like you use on the web development because anyway most of our client developers are coming from the web so let's make it familiar for them and now what we get is uh like this proof of concept of integrating one flipper plugin into actually Expo devtools uh actually yeah good old Chen like this guy is like a Smart Genius you know he always takes like very hard tasks to do for Expo and he did this one uh so now you can yeah check the cache of Apollo client which is like very useful you know like right graphql you just you know you do mutation then your cache automatically updates you don't have to do like invalidation of query like with drag query the cache is just automatically populated if you have like your graphql set up correctly with IDs and so on um so this is just the start like to give the com to give the community uh bright light that all the plugins will have in flipper are gonna eventually get migrated to Expo devtools if somebody like migrates them well that's the article about it it just says hey it's just some stream of information and UI so yeah don't be scared you know do it uh so yeah I guess people will get inspired with this because eventually you just need someone to start it and then the community which basically built the flipper plugins will build also the plugins for expedev tools hopefully yeah so um that that brings me to the question I think you already kind of answered it you don't really recommend flipper that's that's what I hear from from your experience like I mean not only because it makes your app slow but in general you you don't feel like very confident about using flipper actually it's kind of the opposite I really love flipper but it just doesn't work for my current application which got really big you know I guess that's the issue like the application scaled up quite a lot and maybe that's why I like it gets a bit slower with flipper like in particle like sections of the application uh so it's not that I would not recommend it I would definitely use it for any like uh bootstrapped application you know at the beginning it's such a great tool because you don't have to do any other integration yeah you don't have to actually click extra button you click for export f2s which is still you know like you have to launch the dev tools but flipper just works you just launch the application it's in the background uh and it just connects seamlessly okay and so with the current Expo versions I don't actually have to do a lot to connect flipper I mean that's the problem like when you look it up how do I connect flipper to Expo because it didn't immediately work you find like 10 tutorials and they have some integration steps but then they're like from 2020 or 21 and I just immediately know this this can be the real way to use flipper anymore so it has gotten a lot easier now yeah yeah yeah I think Expo definitely will have in documentation uh the setup because they just document everything they have such a good documentation um so I definitely would recommend everyone to actually use it because it will take some time before like Expo Dev tools like merge all the plugins the network inspector it doesn't work for me 100 of time sometimes I just don't see the network request not sure if it's like my local setup the application uh it's again react native it's hard to basically know where the issue is yeah I mean I don't know what was going on here in my application I also had some some random issues so when I pressed uh J it just opened this with like tons of issues uh which you usually see on like the web I just cleared them out and it also looks horrible it always tries to do like web bundling although I didn't want to do web bundling but that's a different story so the problem I also had with debugging is okay so you say flipper is okay but then when I got started I also found something like react native debugger and I installed react native debugger and tried that like tried it out and I also tried reactotron because some people on Twitter said oh yeah you gotta use reactor Trends so there are these like three tools already that I could potentially use for debugging and I've lost like in between can I use this with Expo can I use it with the current version of Expo how does it work what's the best like what is still supported from like are you just using flipper or is there any benefit to using these other tools or is flipper just the the best yeah yeah I would say like flipper is the best obviously kudos to uh react native debugger reactor Throne because they had like well they were built because they were needed before like free flipper came to place you know so they did a job for many people um and just we would mention like in the article people say or Expo road that flipper is getting deprecated like if I open the link what I understood it's getting kind of decoupled from react native yeah right uh it's it's everything called it deprecation unless it's really like deprecation of the whole tool but I would just say it's probably next time you want to use it for react native app probably you have to do a bit more steps than you do now now you don't do almost any so if it's gonna get decoupled from react native there will be some I don't know integration needed it's going to be harder okay let's see when it happens did they say 073 react native I think so [Music] 0.74 oh no in react native 073 yeah okay but that means reactron and react native debugger basically came before so they were great tools but at this point you would just say go with flipper yeah I mean those tools probably work as well great for many people many people love them flipper just also works and that's the thing like everyone had this expectation flipper will solve this you know like the debugging experience for react native and now we are again like changing to a different tool ah why is debugging so hard in react native right yeah that's my question right and uh blind Ray also saying using J2 open debugger creates two Chrome applications which is a pain yeah I think um XBox probably not yet figured out everything related to this um both to their debugging tools and something I would really like I just want to use the browser debugging tools for for the up running on a device I don't know if we will ever get there um but yeah at least it means Expo is Hurricane once again in the right direction uh with this proof of concept uh which brings us kinda to the end of the Expo news so the Expo launch week um I feel like the Expo SDK 49 was the latest version had like bigger news for developers like we had the Explorer version 2 and um yeah we had the debugging tools included this launch party was probably not like the biggest thing uh it just gradually improves some different areas and just like the um last element it was a proof of concept the sequel light was like more of a let's give this a try and check it out so was the the launch party more or is the launch party in general more for like smaller stuff and like making progress in all kinds of directions with Expo is that the usual scheme yeah that's how I see it as well uh like imagine if they released all this news like articles on their blog post individually it wouldn't probably resonate with people enough but if they bundle it into one particular lunch week it does resonate and we are just doing a review you know people talk about it right yeah yeah so I think it it worked great for them I remember Super Bass when they started they started doing these launch weeks and were they like the first hard to say they must have got inspired from someone as well but their launch weeks were super successfully successful to create buzz you know and Twitter their GitHub Stars you know are through the roof so I think for like bigger organization if you can like bundle lots of news into like one week it's so good for your product yeah I have a recommendation for Expo as well so when super based their launch weeks they always reached out to some bigger creators to create tutorials and blow them out through the weeks so if Expo is doing the next launch week maybe you reach out to some crate that's just an idea or so but I think that really like helped um Super Bass also had I don't know if they called this I think they call them content storms where pretty much like all your Twitter and Instagram and YouTube was filled with creators doing some tutorial about Super Bass so they uh really big marketing I mean they also post like memes every day on Twitter and yeah they're really invested in this before we wrap up the stream today I want to talk about one more thing which I found on the news I mean we can uh speculate about what's coming next to Expo but we already did this somewhat in our podcast which will go live soon but there's one thing that caught my eyes uh on Twitter yesterday and since we're covering the news in in this new format here let's talk about this and what you think about this so I found this news Tailwind is a game changer for react native wow I don't know if you heard about this I mean Native wind is nothing new you can use uh basically Tailwind CSS in react native which is I think pretty cool um but just yesterday I found uh what's the name of the Creator and then also Cedric left a comment wait until you see version four I don't know what Cedric knows already that I don't know um but it seems like Expos adding native Tailwind CSS support with Native wind 4. um do you have any information about the whole case Expo tailwind and Native wind uh I think this will be connected to explore router or something like that like is it Mark Taylor does his name I think the creator of native event and he went to work on explore router and bringing the CSS you know seamless experience for the expert users when they are working on like Expo app and so on uh so I guess instead of maybe like CSS modules I think that's what was the use case they use for explore router you can use Tailwind as default and basically make Delavan application for Android iOS and web in one go so maybe that's what they are planning like developers definitely love Tailwind uh I'm kind of more like a freestyle guy from Shopify because we have like designers with very strict themes and for me it's like very nice user experience you know itself and people love it so let's use it I guess it makes the experience to build Universe application really really nice you know yeah is just a heads up the native one isn't part of the Expo event or release is on the way and I'll have details soon also what I found in his profile from earlier this year was pretty interesting because he had CSS powered animations in react native running an expo go powered by reanimated um I think that was pretty cool oh that is now definitely covering too much of my screen but he basically managed to make the Tailwind animation stuff work in a react native application and somehow connected it with reanimated so to run the animations natively um I mean it's probably not a game changer for everyone but for like the regular Indie hacker or the small project like we love to use Tailwind CSS and like people can create epic applications with that and if we can then also use what we know from tailwind and the animations and have it in a performant way like everything coming together I think that could be a really really epic experience definitely I think the Imp like the performance way is very important because uh whatever use natively for Android iOS not always performs well well on the web so if they figure it out uh that's gonna be a really nice experience here yeah yeah and I agree to the whole Universal thing uh I'm really looking forward to the like I still need to try this out next year is with solito and tamagui and and uh react native Expo router like putting everything together uh I don't know if there's a great example of that yet and I don't know if if it works as good as I hope it does um but of course that would be like the dream to everything in one repository and shared routes and like Easy universal links and uh I mean that's the future probably let's see uh Ray I still have ionic angular but I'm gonna have to build now an expo just too easy yeah I I agree to that that's that's my problem as well I also love ionic angular and capacitor and everything it brings but Expo and react native it's just so easy to to build stuff that really looks great and feels natively I mean I always said ionic feels native and it does to some degree but it's still a webview so there will always be some drawbacks with that approach um I just like really like Expo as a company and what they're doing and how they simplify uh the whole react native experience Nick loves Tailwind yes me too me too I think I'm going to do my next application with Tailwind uh hello guys I'm from Brazil here congratulations I always helped me work thank you just just say babe uh and thank you Nick thank you both for this great overview of the latest Expo yeah we're happy to provide the news actually kudos to Aaron because he reached out to me uh after our interview he said hey why not cover the latest news and I was really happy to jump on a call with you again today because you're using react native in production in a great company uh and you just have insights from a completely different perspective into like the real things people use so yeah if you enjoyed this leave a thumbs up uh definitely also subscribe to both of us uh on Twitter and leave comment if we should do this again how often is Expo doing these launch weeks it was the first one who knows we're ready to cover you again in the future do some more launch weeks um and also like the SDK 50 is the next one what do you expect like before Christmas oh yeah it's gonna be probably winter or late late Autumn um so let's see what it brings as of now I'm not really sure I can have like something uh exciting later this year so probably we're gonna then talk about Tailwind native wind integration and all the new things so thank you everyone for joining me today uh thank you Aaron for joining me our power hour is over uh and I'm gonna catch all of you hopefully next week in the next three actually and next week I'm not gonna be here uh but then two weeks we're gonna do another epic react native Project Check out galaxies.dev if you want to learn more about react native and now have a great rest of the week take care guys bye bye

Channel: Simon Grimm

Views: 2,801

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Id: LIRlZIUaBEg

Length: 61min 45sec (3705 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023