I'm sorry, but Expo sucks

Hi all :wave:

I never though I’d say such thing, but Expo really sucks.

We started with an Expo app and that was awesome. The development was very fast.

At some point we needed a Rich Text Editor and couldn’t find anything which didn’t rely on react-native link . Well, working with Expo was so great we didn’t want to eject. We were afraid of ejecting. So we implemented a Rich Text Editor which runs without any additional native component. It took few weeks and it’s not perfect, but hey, we’re still in Expo!

Then we met another blocker. In-app purchases. From what I read online it’s a blocker for many teams. Expo don’t support it and won’t support it anytime soon, so we had to eject.

Here starts the pain. Every time a new update is out there are a lot of issues. We updated to Expo 31 last week and still didn’t manage to fix all the troubles for all the people in the team. We’re losing time and money because we bet on Expo. We also tried desperately to buy support from them but they don’t seem interested. Let’s forget about their Slack channel. You won’t find any answer there, just a lot of people asking questions. Indecent.

You know what? We decided to downgrade our app to the latest stable version. Let’s reach the milestone we have in our program. After that we’re going to replace every single expo dependency with something else and we’re waving off Expo forever.

Hi, first off, I’m sorry that you haven’t had the experience we want and try to provide for developers. Working to implement a totally JS rich text editor instead of ejecting shows how important the managed workflow was to you, and we really appreciate that! Getting feedback from devs helps us to improve, so I do appreciate it, but I just want to address some of your points:

Regarding SDK upgrades- we’ve really improved the entire process recently. SDK 31 is a little over a year old and was deprecated back in September, and I think if you upgrade to one of our supported SDKs, you’ll notice there’s a big difference (especially now with the expo upgrade command doing so much of the work for you).

In terms of support- that’s actually my bread and butter :smile: I’m not sure what avenue(s) you’ve used to try and request support, but going through this page is the best way. If you’d prefer, you can send an email instead to secure@expo.io

I’m not sure what you mean when you say you downgraded to the latest stable version (if that version is <31, it has been deprecated). Currently the oldest SDK we support is 33

For in app purchases, I get your frustration. It’s definitely a hot feature for a lot of people, but we’ve outlined why supporting that in the managed workflow isn’t one of our top priorities here. We built the Expo IAP module so that you can implement them in the bare workflow, and the bare workflow experience is just going to continue to get better and better in 2020!

6 Likes

Glad to see you guys take all this in a positive manner
More power to you and looking for upcoming improvements.