r/expo

PMs, designers, and backend engineers on our team often needed to check a staging build. Sometimes they wanted to verify a layout, sometimes reproduce a bug, or just confirm that an API change behaved the way they expected.

Sending the build wasn't the hard part.

Actually running it was.

Most people didn't have Xcode or Android Studio set up, and asking them to install everything just to check one build wasn't realistic. The alternative was usually asking a mobile developer to install the app or share their screen, which happened more often than we'd have liked.

We looked at services like Appetize and BrowserStack, but they didn't really fit how we work. We already had Macs available internally, and we weren't comfortable uploading app binaries to an external service just so teammates could review a staging build.

So I started building an open-source tool that runs iOS simulators and Android emulators on a Mac and streams them to the browser.

The idea wasn't to replace TestFlight or Appetize. I just wanted an easier way for teammates to review staging builds without needing a mobile development setup.

It's still early (v0.x), but building it has taken me into a lot of areas I hadn't worked on before—video streaming, low-latency input forwarding, simulator orchestration, and React Native QA workflows.

I'm curious how other React Native teams handle this.

How do non-mobile developers on your team review staging builds?

• TestFlight?
• Internal APKs?
• BrowserStack or Appetize?
• Something else?

If you're interested, here's the project:

https://github.com/jo-duchan/tapflow

Solo dev here. I kept owning things and forgetting where I put them, so I built Store & Forget.

The whole point is zero effort to catalog: you don't type or tag anything. Snap a photo and it auto-fills what the item is (the photo scan uses a cloud AI service). Later you find it by searching names, descriptions, or which box or room it's in, or tap "Smart Find" to search by meaning.

Local-first: everything sits in an on-device database, no account, no sign-up. Optional backup to your own Google Drive.

It's free, Android only. Would love feedback from other builders.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.koalalab.storeandforget

Hey folks,

This is my first ever post on reddit, so please be kind.

I initially posted it on X and it picked up quite a lot of traction there & I've always wanted to start posting and being active on Reddit so here I am.

I am the founder of a ui/ux research product that has 800+ apps & 35,000+ screens. I did a comprehensive study on why these apps are banking more than others and how are they able to retain way higher than general.

From my study, I realised that the most important moment is when a person opens an app. This sets an impression on how deeply individual gets involved in it.

The motion, transitions, micro-interactions, typography, all of them matter more than you think they do.

So, I took 10 of the most popular ones, broke them down and redid them using React Native + Expo and open-sourced it, so people can use that as an anchor point.

Here it is (500+ stars at the moment):
https://github.com/Appllama/top-welcome-screens

I hope you find it useful, I'd love to know your thoughts.

Which one do you like the best?

l kept struggling to find Skia shader components that were actually ready to drop into an RN app. most shader code out there isn't built for RN's Skia renderer at all. So l put together my own library. Some shaders are free, others are from artists who charge for their work

l know ShaderToy exists, but that's generic GLSL you'd have to manually port to SkSL and adapt for RN UI. Мinе is already RN-Skia-ready and built specifically for UI components like buttons and panels etc.

Let me know if you'd use something like this

Someone in the Expo community (Aras Diler) shipped a social app called udictio and wrote up how the App Intents work. Good read if you've wondered how far you can push native iOS features while keeping one Expo project as the source of truth.

https://expo.dev/blog/building-a-native-first-social-platform-with-expo

How come when I first open the app up the contents of the tabs are not renting the text and position correctly?
Not only does this happen when I first opened the app, but some screens make the tab bar disappear and when I go back, it’s the same.

If I click onto one of the tabs that is not running correctly, once the active tab updates it becomes rendered correctly

Attached two photos, one before and one after which is how it’s supposed to look all the time

Appreciate any insights or ideas.

Hey Everybody, just released this new app “Broad Street: Card Scanner” With RN Expo that lets you tracks your cards like how you would with stocks as many people view them as investments with volatility similar to stocks! Please all feedback and idea would be appreciated! Completely free and Link in comments!

I really like the adjustment controls in the iPhone Photos app, so I recreated the experience in React Native.
Built with Expo, Reanimated, and Gesture Handler.

Whenever I ate out with friends, I kept doing the same thing: taking five separate food photos, forgetting what we ordered, and never looking at them again.

So I built PlateDiary.

You take one photo of the whole table. On-device image processing finds each dish and drink, cuts them into separate saves, and groups that table into a moment. Those moments build a board you can revisit later and appear on a map of the places you’ve eaten.

The part I cared about most was keeping it fast:

• One photo

• Confirm the cutouts

• Done in about three seconds

• Names, stars, and notes are completely optional

• No account required

• Photos stay on your device, and the main experience works offline

PlateDiary is now available on iOS and Android. The core experience is free; optional Premium adds collections, personalization, and more creative sharing tools.

https://platediary.app

The one thing I’d genuinely love feedback on:

After watching the first 10 seconds, is it obvious why you’d use this instead of leaving the photo in your camera roll? If not, where did I lose you?

Hey guys!

For the past 3 months i've been working on a tiny IOS app - Yap.

It's a voice first journaling app that automatically sorts your thoughts and allows you to easily look back.

I am someone that has journaled for more than 10 years now, but i'm slowly finding it more and more cumbersome to do so after a long day.

Privacy is obviously super important here, so Yap uses on-device models and locally hosted LLMs by me (so the big tech don't train their models on your journal). All the data is saved on device and can be exported at any point.

If you install the app you get it completely for free - forever. At some point i'll have to start charging people but the founding members keep theirs for free.

LMK what you think and if you get a second, i'd LOVE an upvote on product hunt :)

I ride with three apps running at the same time.

u/Strava for the stats and the community. u/Relive for the route videos. u/INTVL for the the real life territory capturing thrill. Every single ride, I open all three, hit record on each one, and pray I didn't forget one before I clip in.

I got tired of it. So I started building a fix for myself.
Velodrop is a single app that records your ride once and automatically syncs it to all your cycling platforms at the same time. I know you can currently sync INTVL to Strava and many more platforms but I wanna make Velodrop the one stop shop for that and many other platforms. No more pre-ride app juggling. You open one thing, you ride, everything else gets handled.

The MVP landing page is live today: https://velodrop-ride.vercel.app/
I'm starting with Strava and Relive, and I'm in talks with INTVL about opening up the same kind of sync access. The mobile app will be built in u/Expo , and I'll be doing it entirely in public as part of the u/RevenueCat Shipaton 2026 hackathon, going for the Next Gen Student and Building in Public awards.

If you're a cyclist who does the same awkward multi-app routine before every ride, I'd love to know what you're running.

What platforms would make Velodrop worth switching to? Go to the Contact section on the landing page and tell me. That feedback is going to shape what gets built first.

And if this already sounds like something you'd use, join the waitlist.

I’ve been working on animated numbers and our previous Skia-based implementation kept having issues around canvas sizing, font loading, blank renders, and animations getting stuck during rapid updates.

So I created react-native-number-animation:

- Core Animation on iOS

- Canvas on Android

- No Skia or Reanimated dependency

- Currency, percentages and compact numbers

- Custom fonts

- RTL and localized digits

- Handles rapid updates

- Supports Reduce Motion

I’d love feedback, especially from anyone testing it in lists or with unusual number formats!

GitHub: https://github.com/invivek26/react-native-number-animation

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-number-animation

I got curious about how SwiftUI’s numericText transition could feel on Android, so I tried recreating the behavior natively.

This is the result, same sequence running side by side on iOS and Android.

What started as a small experiment turned into react-native-numeric-text.

On iOS it uses the native numeric text transition. On Android, I recreated the behavior natively from scratch.

I learned a lot digging into how the transition behaves and figuring out how to reproduce that feel on Android.

It’s now open source:

GitHub: https://github.com/AmatoGiulio/react-native-numeric-text
NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-numeric-text

npm install react-native-numeric-text