Hey React Native 🩵 Developers,
The Expo team has made mobile app development super interesting. Recently they published Expo orbit which is a macOS and Windows app that accelerates your development workflow by allowing one-click installation and launch of builds or updates from EAS, local files, or Snack projects on simulators and physical devices. Today we will explore more details about Expo orbit.
CREDITS: A big thanks to Kadi Kraman and Gabriel Donadel for their amazing talks on these topics at App Js Conf 2024.
Before Orbit, installing development builds or updates from EAS (on Android and iOS physical devices or emulator/simulator) or running Snack projects on simulators was manual & time-consuming.
For instance, to install a development build, first, you need to download the archive from the builds that you created. Next, open the iOS simulators from Xcode and then drag and drop it into the simulator (in the case of iOS). A demo of it was shown by Gabriel Donadel in App Js Conf 2024.
Similarly, to install Snack projects, additional steps need to be followed like installing Expo Go on the virtual device, then logging in using the expo credentials, and then selecting the Snack from the list. Ahh, lots of pain to run a simple Snack project 😞.
All of these complicated and lengthy processes daily are too much 🤦.
Recently, the Expo team released Expo Orbit (a macOS menu bar app that enables one-click build launches, and simulator management) V1.0 in November 2023. Then in March of this year, they released V1.1, which supports launching EAS Updates (live app updates for a cloud build) directly in Android Emulators and iOS Simulators. Lastly, just a couple of days ago, Gabriel Donadel announced that from now on, Expo Orbit will also be supported on Windows & Linux (still in the Pre-release phase).
So, Expo Orbit makes all of the steps mentioned above as seamless as possible. As mentioned earlier, It is now very simple to launch your Android emulators and iOS simulators using Expo Orbit from the menu bar, as shown below.
Also, now users can launch their builds from the website (Cloud builds) to Expo Orbit in a very easy manner, as shown below.
With this significant progress, the Expo team announced that Expo Orbit speeds up by 10x when installing builds 🔥.
Similarly, you can also open snack projects using Expo Orbit within a couple of seconds, as shown below.
Additionally, Expo Orbit can now install EAS updates (live app updates for a cloud build) from expo.dev on your devices or simulators, as shown below.
Besides macOS, Expo Orbit now also supports Windows and Linux in V2.0, which is still in the pre-release (experimental) phase. For Windows, it currently only supports x64 and x86 machines. Compatibility for other architectures will be available soon! Below is shown how Expo Orbit runs on Windows.
I hope that, with all the magic of Expo Orbit mentioned above, you are interested enough to install it on your device today. To install on macOS, use the following command.
brew install expo-orbitNOTE: You can download Orbit for Windows directly from the GitHub releases.
I hope you enjoyed reading it. It would be really great if you could consider giving it a STAR ⭐️.
I'm Anis, Sr. React Native Engineer and the author of React Native Advanced Guide Book with 1.7K STAR ⭐️. Over 5 years in React Native and Full Stack, I’ve built numerous production-grade apps. You can 🩵 CONNECT me in X for any consultation.