How to Build a React Native App Faster with Expo: A Founder’s Guide

In 2025, the average cost to build a custom mobile app in the US landed between $50,000 and $150,000 – and that’s before maintenance, updates, or a single pivot. Meanwhile, US-based development agencies typically charge $100 to $180 per hour for mobile work. For most founders, that math is brutal.

Yet right now, somewhere, a founder just burned $50,000 and three months on development delays – only to discover their competitor shipped the same app in six weeks for a fraction of the cost using a cross-platform mobile development framework.

The difference? They knew something you’re about to learn.

Here’s what separates winners from losers: Speed trumps perfection when validating your mobile app idea. The faster you can test your concept with real users, the quicker you’ll know if you’re building something people actually want. 

That’s where Expo transforms mobile app development from an expensive engineering challenge into a streamlined process that gets your app to market faster – without requiring you to understand every line of code.

But here’s the part most founders miss (and it costs them everything). The mistake isn’t technical – it’s strategic.

This guide is written for the people who make the decisions – founders, CTOs, product leaders, and operations heads – not just the developers on your team. 

You don’t need a computer science degree to follow along. What you need is a clear understanding of how Expo changes the business case for mobile development, what it means for your budget and your team, and how companies like Coinbase, Discord, and Walmart are already using it to ship faster with hybrid app development approaches. That’s exactly what this guide delivers.

What Makes Expo Different from Standard React Native Development

React Native is the technology that lets companies build iPhone and Android apps using a single codebase instead of writing two completely separate apps. Facebook (Meta) created it, and it’s now one of the most popular mobile development tools in the world. The business promise is obvious: one team, one codebase, two platforms. But here’s the trap that catches most companies.

Setting up a traditional React Native project means your development team needs to configure Apple’s build tools (called Xcode), Google’s build tools (called Android Studio), and dozens of other software dependencies before they can write a single line of actual product code. On a good day, that setup takes a full working day per developer. On a bad day – which is more common than agencies will tell you – it takes weeks of troubleshooting.

Most founders hit this wall and wonder: Can we build a mobile app without all that setup? The short answer is yes – and that’s exactly what Expo enables. But understanding why this matters requires looking at what traditional mobile development actually costs your company.

Expo is a production-grade platform built on top of React Native. Think of it as React Native with everything already assembled and ready to go. Instead of your team spending weeks assembling dozens of tools and libraries, Expo provides all of them in one place – pre-tested, pre-configured, and ready to use.

The difference becomes obvious when you look at timelines. A traditional React Native setup might consume a full week of your developers’ time just getting their environments ready. With Expo, developers start building actual features within 30 minutes. That’s not a marketing claim – it’s the documented experience of over 3 million developers worldwide, and it’s backed up by the fact that Expo is officially recommended by Meta as the standard way to build React Native apps.

Here’s what that means in practice:

• Instant app previewing – Anyone on your team can see the app on a real phone by scanning a QR code. No special software needed on their end.
• Built-in device features – Camera, location tracking, push notifications, and dozens of other capabilities come included. Your team doesn’t build these from scratch.
• Push updates without app store delays – Ship bug fixes and small changes directly to users’ phones without waiting days for Apple or Google to approve them.
• Cloud-based building – Your team doesn’t need expensive Mac computers or specialized hardware to generate the final app files. It all happens in the cloud.
• Modern performance by default – The current stable version (SDK 54) runs on React Native’s newest architecture automatically. No extra work required.

What this means for your budget: Traditional mobile setups require multiple high-end developer workstations, software licenses, and often dedicated Mac hardware just for iPhone builds. For early-stage companies validating an idea, Expo cuts these infrastructure costs dramatically. When founders ask “How much does it cost to set up mobile development?” the answer with Expo is a fraction of what it used to be.

But cost savings are just the beginning. The real advantage? Speed becomes your competitive moat – not because you build faster, but because you learn faster.

Understanding what Expo is and how it works is one thing. Understanding why it matters for your business timeline is another. Let’s look at the specific reasons founders choose Expo when speed to market is critical.

Why Founders Choose Expo for Faster Time to Market

Speed isn’t just about developer convenience. For founders and leadership teams, faster development means faster learning, faster pivots, and faster discovery of whether your product actually fits the market. Every week saved in development is a week you could spend talking to real users. Expo removes the technical friction that typically eats into that critical validation window.

Here’s what most development agencies won’t tell you about mobile app timelines. The infrastructure complexity you’re avoiding with Expo isn’t just a technical convenience – it’s a competitive advantage that compounds daily.

Reduced Technical Complexity

Every hour your developers spend fighting build configurations is an hour they’re not building features your users care about. Expo handles the infrastructure complexity so your team focuses on the product itself.

In traditional mobile development, teams routinely lose 20-30% of their timeline to issues that have nothing to do with your app – things like certificate management for Apple’s App Store, software version conflicts between team members, and compatibility problems between different tools. These aren’t minor annoyances. They’re productivity killers that directly inflate your development budget.

Expo’s platform eliminates most of these pain points. The practical result? Your team spends their billable hours building your product, not fighting their tools.

What this means for hiring: This is particularly important for early-stage companies. Instead of needing to hire separate specialists for iPhone and Android – which can easily double your engineering payroll – you can ship apps on both platforms with a smaller team of developers who know one language (JavaScript) well. That’s a meaningful cost advantage, especially in today’s US tech hiring market.

But reduced complexity only matters if it translates into tangible speed improvements. Let’s look at how Expo changes the actual development workflow.

Instant Device Testing Without Compilation

In traditional mobile development, every time your team makes a change to the app, they have to go through a “build” process – essentially compiling the code into something a phone can run. Depending on the setup, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to 15+ minutes per change. Multiply that across a team of developers making dozens of changes per day, and you’re looking at hours of wasted time daily.

Expo eliminates this. When your developers make a change, it appears on test phones almost instantly. This isn’t just a developer convenience – it fundamentally changes how fast your team can iterate on the product.

But here’s where it gets really practical for leadership teams. When product managers or designers need to review a new feature, they don’t need a developer to walk them through it. They download a single app called Expo Go on their own phone, scan a code, and see the latest version of your product immediately. No technical setup. No special access. This same capability extends to any stakeholder or potential customer you want to show the app to.

This instant feedback capability fundamentally changes how your entire team collaborates – not just developers.

Streamlined Team Collaboration

One of the hidden costs of traditional mobile development is how it excludes non-technical team members from the feedback loop. In most setups, only developers can see the app until it’s formally “released” – which might happen once every few weeks.

Expo changes this dynamic entirely. Product managers can test new features the moment they’re built. Designers can verify that what was built actually matches what was designed. Marketing teams can start planning launch campaigns around real app experiences instead of static mockups. This tighter feedback loop catches problems earlier – and earlier problems are cheaper problems to fix.

This collaborative approach shifts your company from quarterly release cycles with big reveals to continuous feedback loops that keep everyone aligned on what’s actually working.

And all of this collaboration happens without the infrastructure costs that traditionally made mobile development expensive.

Lower Infrastructure Costs

Traditional mobile development requires your company to maintain substantial infrastructure: Mac computers specifically for iPhone builds, paid developer accounts, automated testing systems, and sometimes physical device testing labs. For a team of 5-10 developers, this infrastructure alone can run $20,000-$50,000 or more in the first year.

Expo Application Services (EAS) moves all of this to the cloud. This matters because many founders face a practical question: Do I need a Mac to build an iPhone app with Expo?

Not for the build process itself. EAS can generate iPhone app files from Windows or Linux computers. You’ll still need an Apple Developer account ($99/year) for actually putting the app in the App Store, but that’s it. No Mac hardware required for your development team.

What this means for operations: Smaller teams can now operate with the same technical capabilities that previously required well-funded engineering departments. This levels the playing field in a way that matters enormously for startups competing against larger, better-funded competitors.

But here’s what separates companies that ship from companies that stall. (You’ll see this pattern in the next section.)

Setting Up Your First Expo Project in Minutes

The fastest way to understand Expo’s speed advantage is experiencing it firsthand. Here’s the complete setup process that gets you from zero to a working app – and yes, it really is this simple.

Here’s that pattern: Every productivity gain in development creates a compounding advantage in learning velocity.

Installing Prerequisites

Before creating your first app, your developer needs Node.js installed – that’s a standard programming tool that runs on any computer. Expo requires version 20 or newer (version 22 is recommended, and it’s supported through April 2027). They’ll also want a code editor like VS Code, which is free software.

The question many people ask at this stage: Does the team need to install Apple’s Xcode or Google’s Android Studio first?

No. Not for initial development with Expo. Your team can build and test the app entirely through Expo Go without any platform-specific tools. This is a meaningful change in how quickly new developers or contractors can start contributing – hours instead of days.

With prerequisites out of the way, let’s see how fast you can actually create a working project.

Creating Your First Project

Your developer runs a single command in their terminal – think of it as a text-based interface where you type instructions:

npx create-expo-app@latest my-app

cd my-app

That’s it. In about 30 seconds, Expo generates a complete project structure – all the folders, files, and configurations needed to build a real app. The latest version of Expo (SDK 55) organizes everything cleanly so your code stays separate from the project setup, which matters more than it sounds when your team starts scaling.

Launching Your Development Server

Your developer runs one more command:

npx expo start

This starts the app’s local server and displays a QR code on screen. Here’s where the magic happens for everyone on your team – not just developers. Anyone with the Expo Go app on their phone (free download from the App Store or Google Play) can scan that QR code and immediately see the app running on their device. Any changes your developer makes show up on all connected phones automatically, in real time.

For testing on computer simulators instead of physical phones, your developer can press a key to open an iPhone or Android simulator on their screen.

Now here’s where most founders make their costliest mistake. They assume that because setup is fast, they should build everything they’ve imagined. Wrong. Speed should drive focus, not feature bloat.

Building Features That Users Actually Want

Speed means nothing if you’re building the wrong things. Expo’s rapid development cycle pairs perfectly with lean startup methodology – the approach where you test assumptions with real users as quickly as possible, rather than spending months building a fully featured product nobody asked for.

The mistake? They confuse activity with progress. Building lots of features feels productive. Building the right features is productive. There’s a critical difference.

Starting with Core User Flows

Resist the temptation to build every feature you’ve imagined. Start with the absolute minimum functionality that delivers real value to a real user. For most apps, this means focusing on one primary thing a user can do.

When founders ask “What features should we build first in our MVP?” they’re really asking “How do we avoid wasting money?” The answer is ruthlessly simple: Identify the single most valuable action a user can take in your app. Build only the features that directly support that one action. Everything else is waste until you’ve proven people actually want what you’re building.

Expo’s built-in library of capabilities makes this faster and cheaper than it used to be. Need users to log in with Google or Apple? That’s already built. Need to take photos in the app? Already built. Need to save sensitive user data securely on their phone? Already built. Each of these features would cost thousands of dollars and weeks of development time if built from scratch.

The bottom line for leadership: This rich library of pre-built capabilities means less of your budget goes toward building infrastructure that every app needs, and more goes toward the unique features that actually differentiate your product.

These built-in components handle most needs, but there’s one area where pre-built solutions won’t save you: navigation. How users move through your app determines whether they stay or leave.

Leveraging Expo’s Built-in Components

Expo SDK includes over 50 pre-built modules covering the most common needs of mobile apps. Here’s what matters most for typical businesses:

• Location tracking – GPS, geofencing, and address lookup. Essential for delivery apps, store finders, field service tools.
• Push notifications – The ability to reach users on their phones even when the app isn’t open. Critical for engagement and retention in almost every category.
• Camera and photo selection – Let users take photos or choose from their library. Needed for anything involving user-generated content.
• File and document management – Store and retrieve files on the user’s device, even when they’re offline.
• Custom fonts and branding – Make your app look and feel like your brand across iPhone and Android.
• Local database – Store structured data on the user’s phone for offline functionality.
• Audio and video playback – For apps that involve media content.

Each of these works identically on iPhone and Android. Your team writes the feature once, and it works on both platforms. Do you need different code for iPhone and Android? For the vast majority of features, no. Expo handles the platform differences behind the scenes automatically. To see how developers are leveraging these capabilities in production apps, check out why Expo is gaining popularity among React Native developers.

Implementing Navigation Patterns

Navigation – how users move between different screens in your app – is one of the most important factors in whether users stick around or delete the app within minutes. Expo’s navigation system (called Expo Router) is the industry standard, and the latest version brings significant improvements.

The newest capabilities include navigation that feels truly native on each platform – tabs on iPhone look and work exactly like tabs in Apple’s own apps, and the same on Android. There are also new animation styles that match what users expect on each device.

Why this matters beyond design: Research consistently shows that apps with confusing navigation see users abandon them during the first session. Getting navigation right from the start – which Expo makes significantly easier – directly affects your retention numbers and, ultimately, your revenue.

Which brings us to a challenge most founders underestimate: making your app feel native on both platforms without doubling your development work.

Also Read: How to Build a Scalable eCommerce Mobile App with React Native & Expo

Designing for Both iOS and Android Simultaneously

Cross-platform development promises write-once, run-everywhere efficiency. The reality requires a bit more nuance. While Expo handles most of the platform differences for you, there are design expectations that iPhone users and Android users have – and apps that ignore them get punished in reviews and retention.

Respecting Platform Design Guidelines

iPhone users expect apps to look and feel a certain way – clean, minimal, following Apple’s design standards. Android users expect a different look, following Google’s Material Design guidelines. Apps that feel “wrong” on either platform get negative reviews and lower retention rates. This isn’t optional for companies serious about app store success.

Expo SDK 54 and beyond provide systems that automatically adapt your app’s colors and visual style to match the operating system – so your app looks correct in both light mode and dark mode on both platforms, without your team having to build that twice.

Your developers can also apply different visual styles to the same app depending on which platform is running it – keeping most of the code shared while respecting what each platform’s users expect.

The practical result: You’re not maintaining two separate apps, but you’re also not forcing iPhone users to accept an Android-style experience (or vice versa). It’s the best of both worlds.

Design consistency across platforms matters, but it means nothing if your app doesn’t work properly on the hundreds of different devices your users actually own.

Testing Across Devices and Screen Sizes

Building for one phone size guarantees problems on others. iPhone alone comes in several screen sizes – from the iPhone 16e at 6.1 inches to the iPhone Pro Max at 6.9 inches. Android is even more fragmented, with thousands of different device models and screen sizes in active use.

Expo Go makes testing across devices practical without expensive device labs. Your team can install the app on various phones simultaneously and test how it looks and behaves on each one.

Do you need to buy dozens of test devices? Having at least one iPhone and one Android device catches the most obvious issues. For broader testing, cloud-based testing services can simulate hundreds of devices without buying them – typically costing a fraction of physical device labs.

Your team should watch for these critical issues:

• Text that’s too small or too large on different screen sizes
• Buttons and touch targets that are too small to tap comfortably
• Layouts that break when a user’s keyboard pops up
• The screen areas at the top and bottom of phones with notches or rounded corners
• Whether the app works in landscape orientation (sideways) if that matters for your use case

Beyond screen sizes, you’ll also encounter features that simply work differently between platforms.

Handling Platform-Specific Features Gracefully

Some features only exist on one platform, or work differently between iPhone and Android. Things like haptic feedback (the subtle vibrations phones give you), widgets, and sharing capabilities vary between platforms.

Expo handles most of this automatically. If a feature isn’t available on a particular platform, the app simply hides that option or offers an alternative – it doesn’t crash. For any custom features your team builds, Expo provides straightforward tools to check which platform is running and adjust behavior accordingly.

The bottom line: This safety net prevents the embarrassing crashes that generate one-star app store reviews.

But design is only half the battle. Performance is where most apps fail. Users won’t tolerate a beautifully designed app that feels slow or drains their battery. Let’s examine how to build performance into your app from the very beginning.

Optimizing App Performance from Day One

A slow app kills a business just as effectively as a bad product. Users make judgments about app quality within the first two seconds. If your app feels sluggish, users leave – and they rarely come back. Performance problems are far easier to prevent than fix, so building with performance in mind from day one saves you significant money and headaches later.

Understanding React Native’s Architecture

The current stable version of Expo (SDK 54, released September 2025) runs exclusively on React Native’s modern architecture. For non-technical leaders, here’s what that means in plain terms: the old way that iPhone and Android apps communicated with each other’s underlying systems was slow – like sending messages through a translator who had to write everything down before passing it along. The new way is a direct conversation. It’s faster, smoother, and uses less memory.

What this delivers in practice:

• Apps scroll through lists 40-50% faster than before
• Animations run smoothly at 60 frames per second – the industry standard for “feels good”
• The app uses less memory on the user’s phone, meaning fewer crashes and better battery life
• Apps open faster

SDK 54 also introduced precompiled XCFrameworks for iOS, which means React Native and its dependencies come pre-built. This reduced clean build times dramatically – in some cases from 120 seconds down to 10 seconds on high-end hardware. While your exact improvement depends on your app’s size and dependencies, most development teams see noticeably faster builds.

None of this requires any configuration from your team. SDK 54 turns all of this on automatically. Your app benefits from these improvements by default.

Implementing Efficient List Rendering

Most apps have lists – feeds, product catalogs, message histories, search results. How those lists are built has a major impact on performance, especially when the list is long.

The standard approach in Expo only loads the items that are actually visible on the user’s screen at any given moment. As a user scrolls, new items load and old ones are removed from memory. This keeps the app running smoothly whether the list has 50 items or 50,000.

Here’s why this matters for your budget: For very large lists – think thousands of items – your developers should also consider loading data in batches (called pagination) rather than all at once. This keeps both the app and your backend servers performing well.

Optimizing Images and Media

Images are one of the biggest factors in how fast an app loads and how much memory it uses. A single poorly optimized image can consume 10-20 megabytes of a phone’s memory. On a phone with limited storage or an older model, that adds up fast.

Expo includes an image component that handles this intelligently – it caches images so they don’t need to reload every time, shows a blurred placeholder while an image loads (so the app never feels empty), and supports modern image formats that are significantly smaller than traditional ones.

The business impact hits three ways: Faster-loading images mean a better user experience, which means higher retention. They also mean smaller app file sizes, which means users are more likely to actually download your app in the first place – especially on Android, where users are more sensitive to app size.

Now let’s talk about deployment – where traditional mobile development becomes a nightmare. You’ve built a performant app, but getting it from your developer’s computer into users’ hands is where most companies hit unexpected delays and costs.

Accelerating Development with Expo Application Services

Getting an app built is only half the challenge. Getting it built, tested, updated, and into users’ hands efficiently is where most companies lose time and money. Expo Application Services (EAS) is Expo’s cloud platform that handles the build, deployment, and update process – replacing the complex internal infrastructure most companies would otherwise need to maintain.

Setting Up Cloud Builds with Enhanced Caching

In traditional mobile development, generating the final app file (the thing you actually upload to the App Store or Google Play) requires specific hardware and software. iPhone builds need Apple’s Xcode running on a Mac. Android builds need specific versions of Google’s tools. Keeping this infrastructure consistent across your entire development team is a constant source of delays and headaches.

EAS Build runs entirely in the cloud. Your developers submit their code, and EAS generates the final app files for both iPhone and Android – regardless of what kind of computer they’re working on. Can you build an iPhone app without a Mac? Yes, through EAS Build. You’ll still need an Apple Developer account ($99/year) for App Store distribution, but the actual build happens on Expo’s servers.

New in 2025-2026: EAS now caches previously compiled components, which speeds up subsequent builds by up to 30%. In practical terms, this means your team spends less time waiting for builds and more time shipping. This feature is available at no extra cost on any plan, including free.

Watch how simple this actually is:

npm install -g eas-cli

eas build:configure

The first command installs the EAS tool. The second creates a configuration file that defines how your app should be built for different purposes – testing internally, showing to stakeholders, or releasing to the public.

Running a build is a single command:

eas build --platform ios

EAS handles everything from there. Most builds complete in 8–15 minutes.

Implementing Over-the-Air Updates

Here’s a scenario that happens to almost every app company: you discover a bug after launch. In traditional mobile development, fixing it means submitting a new version to the App Store, waiting 24–48 hours (sometimes longer) for Apple to review and approve it, and then hoping users actually update their app. For a bug that’s affecting revenue or user experience, that timeline is unacceptable.

Expo’s over-the-air update system bypasses this for the majority of changes. When users open your app, it automatically checks for and downloads updates in the background. Bug fixes and feature changes reach users within hours, not days – and without waiting for app store approval.

EAS Update has been optimized significantly. Hermes bytecode diffing reduces update sizes by downloading only what changed – reducing update sizes by approximately 75%. Smaller updates mean faster updates and less data usage for your users.

What can and can’t be updated this way matters more than most founders realize: Changes to the app’s screens, logic, and visual assets can all be pushed instantly. Changes that require new hardware capabilities or deeper system integrations (rare for most updates) still need a traditional app store release. Understanding this boundary helps you plan your release strategy.

Managing Environment Variables and Secrets

Here’s a cautionary tale every founder should know: Production apps contain sensitive information – API keys, database passwords, payment processing credentials. This information should never be visible in your source code or version control system. One leak of these credentials can cost a company far more than the entire app development budget.

EAS provides a secure way to store and manage these secrets. Your team defines them through EAS’s dashboard or command line, and they’re injected into the app during the build process – never visible in the code itself. Different environments (development, testing, production) can use completely different credentials, which prevents the costly mistake of accidentally running production-level charges in a test environment.

With your build and deployment pipeline established, the next critical step is getting your app accepted by Apple and Google. This process has specific requirements that, if missed, can delay your launch by weeks.

Also Read: Why Expo.dev is Gaining Popularity Among React Native Developers: Benefits, Trade-Offs, and When to Skip it

Preparing for App Store Submission

Building your app is only half the battle. Getting it approved and published in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store requires specific preparation. Both stores have become increasingly strict about what they accept, and a rejection wastes time and delays your launch. Expo streamlines this process significantly.

Creating App Store Assets

Both app stores require specific visual materials before they’ll even consider your submission. Each platform has exact size requirements that must be met precisely.

Expo’s configuration file handles basic app information – name, description, version. For the stores themselves, here’s your checklist:

• App icon – 1024×1024 pixels, PNG format. Expo automatically resizes this into every size both platforms require, so your team only creates one version.
• Screenshots – At least 2-3 per device size category, showing the app actually being used. These are the first thing potential users see in the store listing.
• Feature graphic (Google Play only) – A 1024×500 pixel banner image displayed at the top of your Play Store listing.
• Privacy policy URL – A link to a page explaining what data your app collects. This is legally required by both stores.
• App description – Up to 4,000 characters on both platforms. This is your marketing copy. Keywords matter here for discoverability.
• Category selection – Which section of the store your app appears in. This affects how many people find it organically.

A note on screenshots: Can Expo generate these automatically? No – but your team can capture high-quality screenshots from the app itself during development. The strategic advice here is simple: show your app solving a real problem for a real person. Screenshots that demonstrate value consistently outperform screenshots that just show features.

Configuring App Permissions and Privacy

Modern phones require apps to explicitly ask permission before accessing sensitive capabilities – the camera, location, contacts, and so on. Both Apple and Google have become stricter about this, and app store reviewers will reject submissions that request permissions without clear, honest explanations.

Your developer configures these permissions in the app’s setup file. The text in quotes is what the user actually sees on their phone when the app asks for permission. It needs to be specific, honest, and directly tied to something the user benefits from. Vague or suspicious permission requests get flagged by both stores and by users.

The compliance question every founder must answer: Do I need a privacy policy for my MVP?

Yes, absolutely – even if your app collects minimal data. Both stores now require a privacy policy URL before they’ll accept a submission. This isn’t optional or something you can add later. Standard privacy policy generators like TermsFeed or GetTerms provide solid starting templates. If your app handles health data, financial information, children’s data, or data from European users (covered by GDPR), legal review is strongly recommended.

Building Production-Ready Binaries

Once your app’s metadata and permissions are properly configured, you need to generate the actual files that get submitted to the app stores. The version of your app that developers test internally looks and behaves differently from the version that goes to real users. Development versions include debugging tools, detailed error messages, and diagnostic features that help developers find and fix problems – but that slow the app down and potentially expose internal details. Production builds strip all of that out and optimize the app for speed.

EAS Build handles this automatically:

eas build --platform all --profile production

This single command generates optimized app files for both iPhone and Android simultaneously, ready for submission to both stores.

Submitting to the stores: EAS Submit automates the technical upload process. Your developer provides their Apple Developer credentials, and EAS handles uploading the app to Apple’s review system. Google Play works the same way. You’ll still need to fill in the store listing details manually (descriptions, screenshots, pricing), but the technical submission is handled for you.

Planning Your Phased Rollout

Launching your app to every potential user on day one is a high-risk strategy. Undiscovered bugs affect more people, negative reviews accumulate before you can respond, and your servers might not handle unexpected traffic. Smart companies launch gradually.

Both app stores support phased rollouts. Apple allows you to release to a percentage of users over 7 days automatically. Google Play lets you control exactly what percentage of users see your app at any given time.

What percentage should you launch to initially?

Conservative and smart: start at 5-10% of users, or release first to a specific group of beta testers. Monitor for 24-48 hours, watching for crashes, performance issues, and early reviews. If everything looks healthy, increase to 25%, then 50%, then 100%.

Expo’s over-the-air update system provides an important safety net here. If you discover a problem during rollout that’s fixable without a new app store submission – which covers the majority of bugs – you can push a fix instantly without pausing the rollout or waiting for approval.

This layered approach protects your brand reputation while maximizing how quickly you learn from real users.

Getting your app launched successfully is a major milestone – but it’s just the starting line, not the finish. The real work begins once users have the app in their hands. What they do with it, where they struggle, and why they come back (or don’t) becomes your roadmap for everything that follows.

Monitoring and Improving Post-Launch Performance

Launching is just the beginning. The apps that grow are the ones that continuously improve based on real data about how users actually behave. The difference between apps that scale and apps that stagnate almost always comes down to how seriously the company takes measurement and iteration after launch.

Here’s what the data reveals about successful mobile apps.

Implementing Analytics and Crash Reporting

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Analytics reveal how users actually use your app – which is often very different from how you assumed they would. This data is what drives smart product decisions and helps you allocate your development budget where it matters most.

Expo works seamlessly with the most popular analytics platforms used by US companies: Segment, Firebase (Google), Amplitude, and Mixpanel. Setting these up typically takes your developer a day or less.

What metrics should you actually track? This question determines whether you’re flying blind or making data-driven decisions. Start with these foundational numbers:

• Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) – How many people are using your app regularly?
• DAU/MAU ratio – What percentage of monthly users come back every day? Higher is better. This is called “stickiness.”
• Session length and frequency – How long do users spend in the app, and how often do they open it?
• Retention rates – What percentage of users are still using the app after 1 day, 7 days, and 30 days? This single metric tells you more about product-market fit than almost anything else.
• Revenue metrics (if applicable) – Purchase completion rates, average revenue per user, and customer lifetime value.

Crash reporting is equally critical. Services like Sentry or Firebase Crashlytics automatically capture when and why your app crashes for real users – including exactly what they were doing right before it happened. This lets your team prioritize fixes based on how many users are actually affected, rather than guessing.

Gathering User Feedback Systematically

Analytics tell you what users do. They don’t tell you why. Direct feedback fills that gap – and it’s where you discover the frustrations, feature requests, and unmet needs that pure data can’t reveal.

Build feedback mechanisms into the app from the start. Simple options include a feedback form accessible from the app’s settings, or a “shake to report a bug” feature. More sophisticated companies use session recording tools (like LogRocket) that show exactly what a user was doing on screen right before they hit a problem – making it much faster to diagnose and fix issues.

How do you decide which features to build next? This is the question that separates successful apps from failures. Combine the numbers (which features get used, where users drop off) with the qualitative feedback (what users are actually asking for). Features that many users request and that align with your product vision deserve priority. A single user’s edge case request, no matter how articulate, usually doesn’t.

App store reviews are another source of feedback – but they arrive too late to help individual users. Proactive in-app prompts, triggered after a user has a positive experience, encourage satisfied users to leave reviews before frustrated users get there first. Research shows users who successfully complete a desired action are 3-4x more likely to leave a positive review when prompted at that moment.

Optimizing Based on Real Usage Patterns

Your assumptions about how users will interact with your app will not survive contact with reality. That’s not a criticism – it’s simply how product development works. The companies that win are the ones that adjust fastest based on what real users actually do.

Analyze your conversion funnels – the step-by-step paths users take through your app – with tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel. The critical question is: Where do users drop off?

If more than 30% of users leave at a specific screen, something is wrong there. It might be confusing design, missing information, a technical problem, or simply that the value proposition isn’t clear enough at that point.

Common drop-off points and what to do about them:

• Onboarding screens – Simplify. Reduce the number of steps. Show users the value faster.
• Account creation – Let users sign up with Google or Apple instead of typing out an email and password. Reduce the number of required fields to the absolute minimum.
• Payment screens – Add trust signals (security badges, clear pricing). Remove any unnecessary friction.
• Complex features – Add contextual help. If users need to figure out how something works, the interface isn’t clear enough.

A/B testing – showing two different versions of a screen to different users and measuring which one works better – is the gold standard for making these decisions with confidence. Expo’s update system makes this possible without submitting new versions to the app stores each time.

Performance monitoring reveals which screens load slowly or drain battery life (both of which cause users to uninstall). Focus on fixing the slowest 20% of experiences first – this follows the Pareto principle and delivers the biggest improvement in user satisfaction for the least development effort.

Which leads us to the most important decision you’ll make: whether to build this yourself or partner with experts who’ve done it successfully dozens of times before.

How Bitcot Builds Faster, Smarter Expo Apps

Building a mobile app with Expo accelerates development significantly. But knowing the tools and actually shipping a successful product are different challenges – and the gap between them is where most companies lose money. At Bitcot, we’ve helped founders transform ideas into market-ready apps using Expo and React Native, cutting typical development timelines by 40-60% without sacrificing quality or scalability.

Remember what most founders miss? It’s not the technology – it’s understanding that infrastructure costs compound weekly. Every day your team fights configurations instead of building is money burned on zero user value. This is where strategic partnerships matter.

Our approach combines deep technical expertise with business strategy. We don’t just write code – we help founders validate assumptions before they spend money on them, prioritize the features that drive measurable user value, and build architectures that scale with your business from initial launch to millions of users.

What makes Bitcot’s approach different? We’ve shipped over 200 production Expo apps across fintech, healthcare, e-commerce, logistics, and SaaS – generating over $50M in combined revenue for our clients. We know which shortcuts actually save time and which ones create expensive technical debt you’ll be paying for months later. We’ve navigated the app store rejections, debugged the obscure performance issues, and optimized the bottlenecks so you don’t have to.

We stay current with the latest Expo capabilities – including SDK 55’s performance improvements, the new update system optimizations, EAS build caching, and native navigation APIs – ensuring your app uses the most efficient tools available. But more importantly, we know when not to use the latest features, because stability and reliability matter more than being first to adopt something new.

We understand the founder journey intimately because many of us are founders ourselves. Speed matters, but so does building the right thing. Our discovery process helps you identify your true MVP scope – the smallest version of your product that actually tests your core business hypothesis. We’ve seen countless startups waste 3–6 months building features that end up getting 2% of usage, while under-investing in the core experience that drives 80% of the value.

We handle the complete development lifecycle professionally. From initial architecture design and technology selection through app store submission, analytics setup, and post-launch optimization, Bitcot provides the strategic technical partnership that gets your app to market faster and positions it for long-term growth. Our developers follow industry best practices for code quality, security, performance, and maintainability – not shortcuts that create problems six months down the road.

Enterprise security and compliance: Expo’s platform is SOC 2 Type 2 attested and GDPR compliant. For companies in regulated industries – fintech, healthcare, insurance – this matters enormously. It means the infrastructure your app runs on meets the security standards that enterprise clients and regulators expect.

For founders balancing speed and quality, partnering with a specialized team like Bitcot often proves more cost-effective than building an in-house team from scratch. We bring established processes, reusable component libraries, battle-tested architectures, and existing relationships with service providers (analytics, payments, cloud infrastructure) that would take 6-12 months to develop internally. Check out our React Native app development services to see how we’ve helped companies build scalable, production-ready apps.

Now let’s bring everything together and map out what your journey from idea to launched app actually looks like with Expo.

Moving from Idea to Launched App

Expo removes the technical barriers that traditionally made mobile app development slow and expensive. What once required separate iPhone and Android teams (4-6 engineers minimum), months of environment setup, and infrastructure investment of $50,000-$100,000+ now becomes achievable with a small, focused team and a significantly more modest budget.

The strategic advantage Expo provides isn’t just faster development. It’s faster learning. Every week you cut from your development timeline is another week gathering real user feedback, testing your business model, validating pricing, and iterating toward product-market fit. Speed compounds – the sooner you learn what works, the sooner you can double down on it. For a deeper understanding of how React Native frameworks enable this speed, read our comprehensive guide on React Native frameworks and tech stacks.

When should you choose Expo? This question deserves a straightforward answer. If your app involves standard business functionality – user accounts, data management, communication features, e-commerce, content delivery, location services, or similar – Expo is likely the fastest and most cost-effective path to market. It’s the choice made by companies like Coinbase, Discord, Chime, Varo, FanDuel, NFL Network, and Walmart.

When it might not be: If your app requires highly specialized hardware integrations (industrial IoT sensors, advanced Bluetooth devices), real-time 3D graphics, or very deep integration with platform-specific APIs that Expo doesn’t yet support, a traditional approach may be worth evaluating. These scenarios represent a small percentage of apps, but they do exist. An honest conversation about your specific requirements is the first step.

Start with SDK 55 and the latest stable tools. Build your core value proposition ruthlessly focused on solving one specific problem exceptionally well. Ship to real users quickly, even if the app feels incomplete – it always will. Measure everything systematically with proper analytics from day one. Iterate based on data, not opinions or assumptions.

This cycle – build, ship, measure, learn, iterate – is how successful apps get built. Expo makes the cycle faster by removing technical friction at every step. The faster you spin this flywheel, the faster you learn, and learning speed determines who wins in competitive markets.

The tools exist and they work. The framework is proven at scale by major US companies. The infrastructure scales effortlessly. What remains is disciplined execution focused on user value, not technical complexity for its own sake.

Focus your first version ruthlessly on solving one problem exceptionally well for a clearly defined user segment. Add complexity only when user demand justifies the investment and you have data proving the feature drives key metrics. Most features don’t – most successful apps succeed by doing a few things really well, not many things poorly.

The apps that win aren’t those with the most features on launch day. They’re the apps that ship quickly, learn constantly from real user behavior, and evolve based on validated user needs rather than founder assumptions or competitive feature lists. Expo gives you the technical foundation to compete on speed, learning velocity, and iteration rate – the metrics that actually matter in early-stage product development.

Here’s what happens if you wait: Your competitor launches first. They capture early users. They iterate based on real feedback. You’re still building.

Your next step is straightforward: build something. The faster you get from idea to real user feedback, the faster you’ll know if you’re building something people want. Weeks of planning can’t substitute for one day of real user testing.

Ready to build your mobile app but want expert guidance to avoid the costly mistakes we’ve seen other companies make? Connect with Bitcot’s mobile development team. We’ll help you figure out exactly what to build, how to build it, and how to get it in front of real users as fast as possible – while protecting your investment at every step. Explore our case studies to see how we’ve helped startups and enterprises launch successful apps across multiple industries.