The last few months I've been super busy building native iOS and Android apps for my SaaS app. This week, they got approved by Apple and Google, and my customers are now using it.

I have so much I want to share about the process, because I learned a TON.

Some highlights:

I built the app with React Native. Originally it was built using React Native CLI, and being totally honest, I hated the whole experience. This is the "closer to the iOS/Andriod metal" approach to building a React Native apps, which gives you more flexibility. It wasn't for me.

So, late in the development process, I pivoted to using @expo. Expo is basically a layer on top of React Native that makes the whole process SO MUCH EASIER. They handle the builds, certificate signing, pushing to the stores, over-the-air updates, push notifications, and more.

I seriously can't say enough good about @expo. I went from hating building apps with React Native to totally loving it. Expo allowed me to focus on building the app, and not have to deal with the insane amount of tooling that's necessary to ship a native iOS and Android app.

There is, of course, a tradeoff when using @expo, which is that you're limited to the libraries that they include with Expo. Depending on what you're building, this could be an issue for you. For me, it totally wasn't. It's insane what you can all do with Expo.

The app itself has about ten screens. The data is fetched from a Laravel powered API, and then saved in local storage, so that the app works in offline mode. It also means the app opens super fast, since it always has data ready to be shown, and then updates in the background.

Building an app "offline mode" first was a fun challenge. Having done web development for 20 years, this certainly required a new way of looking at things. I'm super happy with the results.

I chose React Native because I know JavaScript well, and knew React a bit. I really enjoyed the experience of building a native app with this stack. It felt very familiar as a web developer. I even managed to use Tailwind CSS for all the styling.

Finally, a special thanks to @SirCharlesW727 and @mtimofiiv, who both helped me a ton through this process. I couldn't have done it without these fine gents!