Building your project with Expo allows you to make most changes in JavaScript. This helps iterate quickly and safely and allows your team to achieve web-like iteration speeds by dividing your application into:
When your project requires custom native code, a config plugin, a custom runtime version, or a reduced bundle size of the app, you can transition from using Expo Go to develop to a development build.
A development build of your app is a Debug build that contains the expo-dev-client package. As a production build is for the general public, and a preview build lets your team test your next release, a development build lets developers iterate as quickly as possible. It comes with extensible development tools to develop and test your project.
You can think of a development build as your version of the Expo Go client.
The expo-dev-client package is used to create a development build. It is a library designed to support any workflow, release process, or set of dependencies in the Expo/React Native ecosystem. Whatever your project needs, either now or in the future, you'll be able to create a development build for it and get the productivity and quality of life improvements of JavaScript-driven development.
Learn what are the prerequisites and installation steps to create a development build.