Introduction

Ready to advance from Expo Go and get a development build of your project? Follow the Getting Started guide.

Want to get notified of new releases to expo-dev-client with a changelog and upgrade instructions? Sign up for the mailing list.

Building your project with Expo allows you to iterate quickly and safely by allowing you to make most changes in JavaScript. Your team can achieve web-like iteration speeds by decomposing your application into:

A Client: A native binary which is built with Xcode or Android Studio. Expo Go is an example of a client that is used to develop React Native apps.
An Update: A bundle of your application JavaScript code and assets (images, video, fonts, etc.). An update may be served from your local computer with Expo CLI, embedded in the binary by EAS Build, or hosted on a publicly available server.

From Expo Go to Development Builds

To help new projects get started, the Expo Go app is a standard client containing a preset collection of modules. As your project moves toward release, you may find that you need to customize your project, either to reduce your bundle size, to use a module offered by developers in the React Native community, or even to add your own custom native code. At that point, you can build a development client tailored to your project, install it on your phone, and continue developing.

Development builds of your app are Debug builds containing the expo-dev-client package. Like production builds are for the general public and preview builds let your team test your next release, development builds let developers iterate as quickly as possible. They come with extensible development tools to develop and test your project.

Ready to create a development build of your project? Follow the Getting Started guide.