Android APK build takes ages

Hi everyone,

I have a question, that I hope someone can answer.

In a few weeks I have to make an exam, we will have to make a app that supports either IOS, Android or Windows phone. I chose to make an app with React Native using Expo.

Everything was fine until my teacher told me to give him a APK file of the app. I thought it was easy and fast to make an APK with Expo, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I have to make an exam with limited time and right now I’m running an example APK build, and it takes ages!

My questions in short:

  1. Can the process speed up?
  2. Is there a paid subscription that speeds up the building process?
  3. Can I build an React Native App with Expo with things that are exported from ‘expo’?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT:
I just got this message:

|15:14:44 [exp] Waiting for build to complete. You can press Ctrl+C to exit.
-15:36:00 [exp] Timeout reached! Project is taking longer than expected to finish building, aborting wait...

I got this message just now:

|15:14:44 [exp] Waiting for build to complete. You can press Ctrl+C to exit.
-15:36:00 [exp] Timeout reached! Project is taking longer than expected to finish building, aborting wait...

Hi! Is the build still running? Can you provide your build ID if it is?

Most of the time you shouldn’t need to rebuild your APK on every change, you should only need to run exp publish to see your updated app show up in your existing APK. If you change anything in app.json you’ll need to run the build again, but if you aren’t touching app.json then you should be mostly fine to just publish and not run a standalone build.

My build isn’t running anymore. I understand what you are saying but I need to build an APK fast while in my exam. So I would rather (to be safe) find a way to build an APK myself without using EXPO’s service. I know that if I do that I would not be able to use any imports from EXPO. Do you by any chance know of a way to build an APK for my project? Thanks in advance!

Sorry, I’m not sure I understand. Do you have to start a new project and build a full APK from it during the exam?

You might find the compiling a standalone app yourself instructions useful, although I suspect that for the particular situation you’re describing the build times may be unacceptable.

Well my exam for app development takes all day. If I can build a full APK in one hour after finishing developing, that would be fine. I basically don’t want to depend on EXPO building my APK, some people said EXPO sometimes takes 15 hours to build… I can’t rely on that. Thanks for all your answers by the way!

Also I looked at the link. I don’t understand how the command works and what information there should be included. gulp android-shell-app --url [the published experience url] --sdkVersion [sdk version of your experience]. Can you explain?

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