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The SplashScreen module from the expo-splash-screen library provides control over the native splash screen behavior. By default, the splash screen will automatically hide when your app is ready, but you can also manually control its visibility for advanced use cases.

From SDK 52, due to changes supporting the latest Android splash screen API, Expo Go and development builds cannot fully replicate the splash screen experience your users will see in your standalone app. Expo Go will show your app icon instead of the splash screen, and the splash screen on development builds will not reflect all properties set in the config plugin. It is highly recommended that you test your splash screen on a release build to ensure it looks as expected.

Also, see the guide on creating a splash screen image.

Installation

If you are installing this in an existing React Native app, make sure to install expo in your project.

Usage

For most apps, you don't need to do anything special with the splash screen. It will automatically hide when your app is ready. You can optionally configure animation options:

import { Stack } from 'expo-router';
import * as SplashScreen from 'expo-splash-screen';

// Set the animation options. This is optional.
SplashScreen.setOptions({
  duration: 1000,
  fade: true,
});

export default function RootLayout() {
  return <Stack />;
}

import { Text, View } from 'react-native';
import Entypo from '@expo/vector-icons/Entypo';
import * as SplashScreen from 'expo-splash-screen';

// Set the animation options. This is optional.
SplashScreen.setOptions({
  duration: 1000,
  fade: true,
});

export default function App() {
  return (
    <View style={{ flex: 1, alignItems: 'center', justifyContent: 'center' }}>
      <Text>SplashScreen Demo! 👋</Text>
      <Entypo name="rocket" size={30} />
    </View>
  );
}

Delay hiding the splash screen

In some cases, it may be necessary to delay hiding the splash screen until certain resources are loaded. For example, if you need to load API data before displaying the app content, you can use preventAutoHideAsync() to manually control when the splash screen hides. The goal should be to hide the splash screen as soon as possible.

import { Stack } from 'expo-router';
import * as SplashScreen from 'expo-splash-screen';
import { useEffect, useState } from 'react';

// Keep the splash screen visible while we fetch resources
SplashScreen.preventAutoHideAsync();

export default function RootLayout() {
  const [isReady, setIsReady] = useState(false);

  useEffect(() => {
    async function doAsyncStuff() {
      try {
        // do something async here
      } catch (e) {
        console.warn(e);
      } finally {
        setIsReady(true);
      }
    }

    doAsyncStuff();
  }, []);

  useEffect(() => {
    if (isReady) {
      SplashScreen.hide();
    }
  }, [isReady]);

  if (!isReady) {
    return null;
  }

  return <Stack />;
}

import { useCallback, useEffect, useState } from 'react';
import { Text, View } from 'react-native';
import Entypo from '@expo/vector-icons/Entypo';
import * as SplashScreen from 'expo-splash-screen';

// Keep the splash screen visible while we fetch resources
SplashScreen.preventAutoHideAsync();

export default function App() {
  const [isReady, setIsReady] = useState(false);

  useEffect(() => {
    async function doAsyncStuff() {
      try {
        // do something async here
      } catch (e) {
        console.warn(e);
      } finally {
        setIsReady(true);
      }
    }

    doAsyncStuff();
  }, []);

  useEffect(() => {
    if (isReady) {
      SplashScreen.hideAsync();
    }
  }, [isReady]);

  if (!isReady) {
    return null;
  }

  return (
    <View style={{ flex: 1, alignItems: 'center', justifyContent: 'center' }}>
      <Text>SplashScreen Demo! 👋</Text>
      <Entypo name="rocket" size={30} />
    </View>
  );
}

Configuration

You can configure expo-splash-screen using its built-in config plugin if you use config plugins in your project (Continuous Native Generation (CNG)). The plugin allows you to configure various properties that cannot be set at runtime and require building a new app binary to take effect. If your app does not use CNG, then you'll need to manually configure the library.

Using the config plugin, as shown below, is the recommended method for configuring the splash screen. The other methods are now considered legacy and will be removed in the future.

Example app.json with config plugin

{
  "expo": {
    "plugins": [
      [
        "expo-splash-screen",
        {
          "backgroundColor": "#232323",
          "image": "./assets/splash-icon.png",
          "dark": {
            "image": "./assets/splash-icon-dark.png",
            "backgroundColor": "#000000"
          },
          "imageWidth": 200
        }
      ]
    ]
  }
}

Configurable properties

You can also configure expo-splash-screen, using the following app config properties but the config plugin should be preferred.

• splash
• android.splash
• ios.splash

Animating the splash screen

SplashScreen provides an out-of-the-box fade animation. It can be configured using the setOptions method.

SplashScreen.setOptions({
  duration: 1000,
  fade: true,
});

If you prefer to use custom animation, see the with-splash-screen example on how to apply any arbitrary animations to your splash screen. You can initialize a new project from this example by running npx create-expo-app --example with-splash-screen.

API

import * as SplashScreen from 'expo-splash-screen';

Methods

import * as SplashScreen from 'expo-splash-screen';

SplashScreen.preventAutoHideAsync();

export default function App() {
 // ...
}

Types