Support for Windows and MacOs apps development #22273
Replies: 17 comments · 20 replies
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Yeah there's also react-native-macos. Targeting desktops would be great, but sounds like it is currently not a priority. This looks to be deprecated, but suggests running the expo web target via Electron: At least ChatGPT thinks it's possible 🤷♂️ (it isn't 👻) |
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Seems Expo team is not too interested in Win/MacOS desktop platforms, so perhaps the discussion can be now, |
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Any update on the macOS support @tsapeta? I've been keeping an eye on your related closed PRs. Would love to see something like this in the near future: "scripts": {
"start": "expo start",
"aos": "expo start --aos",
"ios": "expo start --ios",
"osx": "expo start —osx",
"win": "expo start —win"
}The 3 letter acronyms look clean 😉 |
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What if Expo, Flutter, Electron merged together to solve the cross-platform once and for all 😆 |
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I think no matter what you will always have a different project for mobile vs windows vs mac as you are still running native so you are going to have different UI to build for each. I am ok with this as I want it to integrate the best it can into the OS to support all the features I can. |
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What if the native just becomes the linux kernel @jtwebman so we stop wasting everyone's time |
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We can have dreams for sure! |
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well, currently there is this issue, if you add macOS to current expo project (ExpoModulesCode seems to be failing build somehow) trying to find workaround myself, but not sure it will be successful |
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I am trying to convert a React Native Expo app to React Native Windows app and React Native MacOC app. To test if that is possible, I created a project using React Native Expo, ran npx expo prebuild to generate the native source code, and then tried to add macOS/Windows app dependencies. On macOS, I am facing the ExpoModulesCore issue. On Windows, I am facing fmt issue: Any suggestions / workarounds? |
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At this point, it looks like the next major player in the cross-platform app will be Tauri, it's not there yet but they intend to support Web, Mobile, and Desktop, so instead of grabbing the Expo app and wrapping the web version in Electron, just using Tauri directly seems simpler and more performant (at least in desktop). |
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The problem with Tauri is that it is no better than Capacitor – it uses the OS webview. On iOS and macOS, this is a massive pain, as WKWebView is horrible. That is the entire draw of Electron: a stable runtime regardless of platform. I do believe that the only reasonable options are: (1) Electron, or (2) actual native UI components. I would expect a RN-to-desktop implementation to target the second option. |
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Yeah, it is a drawback using Tauri. It's easy to set up along with a React Native project, but it has inconsistencies among platforms, and you also need to learn Rust to fully configure Tauri. |
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So is there current guideline for developing an app for win/macos with expo? |
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Here's the screenshot from recent React Conf 2024 
@EvanBacon please shed some light on building for Mac? And possibly on Windows using RN for Windows? |
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This was a Mac Catalyst app – a macOS version of the app for iPads. It's not using |
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Thanks @tsapeta, yep, the one that works on M Macs. But I can't find instructions how to build an Expo app for use with Catalyst... are there any extra steps needed? Apparently we already had a similar discussion in 2021 #7166 (comment) :) |
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@tsapeta @EvanBacon it would be great to get instructions how to build Expo apps for Catalyst. I can't find any documentation that explains this... |
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Continuous attention |
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any update...It would be amazing to have support window/mac version! :) |
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Is this what the #30309 is all about, but For MACOS only? |
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So i did it and worked for me: |
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Does this also work in WSL2 in Ubuntu or do you need to be in the windows system? |
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I haven't tested it on ubuntu or WSL2. |
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Have you tested it on Expo Web? I was able to use it on Android, iOS, and Windows, but when I tried to configure it for Web, Expo on Windows stopped working. |
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Have you tried bundling and making a release build for your app @erfanazari? |
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been a while, is there any updates on this? |
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Expo for desktop windows builds wanted! :) |
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https://docs.expo.dev/modules/additional-platform-support |
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That's just for building a module, not using react-native-macos in expo |
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Any update on if expo will support windows? |
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It's frustrating to watch PRs that would make solid, incremental progress on enabling support for this languish while others sail through without review. It feels like the roadmap at Expo is being driven by a specific team, which doesn't believe Mac development should be part of the agenda. But I think it should be. I interact with a lot of Electron apps daily, which can and do share a lot of code with the web versions of those apps, but which are not native experiences, and take up more resources than they really should. I developed one of these apps, because I had to prioritize desktop, and right now that means Electron, even though my preference in a stack would be React Native/Expo to set up a cross-platform app, which is what I do on another project. It's true that the Mac development experience, even if you solved the Expo part of it, would be rough, but there's a chicken and egg problem that is actively getting solved for the web platform because of Expo's support for it. If React Native's recommendation is "use a framework" and Expo is the only currently recommended framework, then our solid alternatives are... Rock (formerly RNEF)? Stick Expo web in Electron? |
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This is currently the only good option, as far as I can tell |
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any updates on this ? |
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Hello!
I've read on React Native website something interesting! it seems that Microsoft has made some libraries to empower React Native, in order to make it suitable to build Windows/MacOS apps.
Now I think about Expo, what is the plan ?? is it possible for Expo to build for Windows/MacOS like it does for mobile/web now ?
I'd like to open this topic and listen to community thoughts, including Expo team.
Thank you for your attention.
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