The Hadden required a universal app on both Apple and Android to meet their wide and varied user base. Though native apps were considered, the universality of the features caused the team to consider Flutter and React Native. Ultimately, we went with React Native because our major constraint was time to market.

React native is the fastest development time of the two options especially if your team has a background in React development for the web. The major advantage of flutter is performance and in our use case that performance differential would be almost negligible to the end user. React Native also comes with Expo, a very powerful open source development framework. Expo swiftly integrated into our project and comes with some amazing features out of the box. We could quickly add push notifications and geofencing capabilities to our app without the need to write our own plugins for iOS and android respectively. With a few init commands we had access to all of Expo’s features. We could quickly add push notifications and geofencing capabilities to our app without the need to write our own plugins for iOS and android respectively.

Expo Application Services (EAS) Is their cloud deployment tool and makes building and pushing to app stores a breeze. They also offer a free version with limited resources if you are building as a hobby. Expo isn’t perfect and there are always drawbacks. If you need a very specific set of features or packages for your app expo will NOT work and you will have to use a bare react native project where you can create your own plugins in Java/Objective-C.

Overall with the features that we needed to deliver React Native and Expo were the clear winner and we couldn’t be more satisfied with the developer experience that expo provides.