Todd Werth:

Welcome back to React Native Radio podcast, brought to you by the Winter Weather Watch, who are reporting that snow and ice are currently trying to destroy half of the US. Episode 352 Expo Launch with Cedric.

Mazen Chami:

Alright, so episode two of the new year and Jamon is still nowhere to be seen. Have you found him, Robin, or not yet?

Robin Heinze:

I haven't seen him. I am not even sure he still exists.

Mazen Chami:

So 2025, 2025 got the best of him. Alright. And it's actually interesting he didn't even show up for his son on our episode.

Robin Heinze:

Cedric is on the podcast and Jamon's not even here.

Mazen Chami:

Wow. Tisk Tisk Jamon.

Robin Heinze:

For those people who aren't in the loop, Jamon's son's name is Cedric. Not this Cedric, but also Cedric.

Mazen Chami:

Yes.

Robin Heinze:

But it's such an uncommon name that it's quite the coincidence that we have two Cedrics in our circle.

Mazen Chami:

Welcome to the show, Cedric. Thank you.

Robin Heinze:

Oh yeah, spoiler alert. We have Cedric on the episode.

Mazen Chami:

He's here with us.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, thank you. It's great to be here.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, well as always, I'm Mazen, she's Robin and we're React Native Radio and I think for Cedric, what number episode is this? I started looking it up and I was like, okay, one episode, second episode. I was like, alright. He's been on a lot of episodes.

Cedric van Putten:

I think this is my

Robin Heinze:

Third time.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

That feels, that sounds right. Yeah.

Cedric van Putten:

Did anyone else get the third time yet?

Robin Heinze:

I don't.

Mazen Chami:

Don't

Cedric van Putten:

Think so.

Mazen Chami:

Oh hell yeah.

Robin Heinze:

Maybe Evan. Has Evan been on three times?

Mazen Chami:

No, I think Evan has been on

Robin Heinze:

Twice.

Mazen Chami:

Maybe twice.

Robin Heinze:

I think maybe you have the honor.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

So you should really relish that.

Mazen Chami:

Yes.

Robin Heinze:

I don't think we have a trophy or anything for you.

Mazen Chami:

You could just put it on your Slack, your Slack

Robin Heinze:

Profile

Mazen Chami:

Or

Robin Heinze:

Something,

Mazen Chami:

Or Discord profile. The title is enough of a win for me already.

Robin Heinze:

Just put it on your LinkedIn.

Mazen Chami:

Well for any of our listeners who haven't met you before, listened to your previous episodes, can you introduce yourself?

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, of course. My name is Cedric. I work at Expo. I used to do dev tooling or still do dev tooling, but now I'm also very occupied with something called Expo Launch.

Mazen Chami:

Spoiler

Robin Heinze:

Expo Launch. Spoiler alert.

Mazen Chami:

Yes.

Robin Heinze:

Is that maybe what we're here to talk about?

Mazen Chami:

Damn. He's launching our episode already before we even begin. Look at that. The launch fast. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. I think we're losing our listeners at this point.

Robin Heinze:

No, they love us. This is why they tune in.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, they tune in for the warm-up and then they tune out, right? Is that what it's

Robin Heinze:

Right

Mazen Chami:

Expo Launch. Before we get into our topic, let's hear from our sponsor. Infinite Red is a premier React Native consultancy located fully remote in the US. We're a team of 30 senior plus level React Native developers and support staff and have been doing this for nearly a decade.

Robin Heinze:

No, over a decade.

Mazen Chami:

Over a decade. We

Robin Heinze:

Still haven't updated the copy for the ad read, but it is over a decade.

Mazen Chami:

Okay. We've been doing this for over a decade. I don't know if you heard my pen click, but he's

Robin Heinze:

Taking notes,

Mazen Chami:

Taking my notes now. If you're looking for React Native expertise for your next project, hit us up at infiniteredslashradio. Don't forget to mention that you heard about us through the React Native Radio podcast. Alright. As we made our punny jokes earlier, we're talking about Expo Launch and I guess the best way to kick this off is in our prep for this episode. I was like, Robin, so we have Cedric coming on and we're going to talk about this thing called Expo Launch. So we go to Google and type Expo Launch and literally our reaction, my reaction was like, wait, that's it.

Robin Heinze:

No, exactly. I watched the video and I was like, what?

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, Beto had a video

Robin Heinze:

And he clicked like three times and a build was done and it was on the App Store. And I was like, it can't be that easy.

Mazen Chami:

That can't be that easy.

Robin Heinze:

I think I heard that a lot. There is like no way that that is that easy. Like how many shortcuts did they take to get that to work? And like there's no way that's what it's like. And that's what it's like, right Cedric?

Cedric van Putten:

I wish I could say it's that easy. We might have a few more hoops to jump through because of Apple's process. But besides those hoops, yeah, it's actually fairly straightforward.

Robin Heinze:

I actually looked at the docs this morning and there were like four little steps that you do the first time and then it's basically automated from then on, which was, is that an accurate assessment?

Cedric van Putten:

That is an accurate assessment. Yeah. And for like four little steps is like, you have to have your Apple Developer account, so you need to get that paid for, which is 99 bucks a year. You have to create a team on the Apple Portal, the Apple Developer Portal. And then you have to go through the Expo Launch sort of onboarding and just give it the proper permissions to do stuff in your App Store Connect account and on your Apple Developer account. And after that, yeah, you have like a default config. You can edit to your settings and then it's just basically launching everything and it's deploying to the App Store.

Robin Heinze:

Wow.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. And just to step back and just make sure everyone's on the same page here, what is Expo Launch? What are we talking about here? Because yes, he explained it and like yes, we made a couple of jokes and things, but what is Expo Launch?

Cedric van Putten:

Expo Launch is a tool that connects your GitHub repository with the App Store essentially. So we can connect your Expo app or React Native app. That's the goal or Flutter app. All of those apps, we can connect to the App Store. And what happens is the moment you do a new commit on a specific branch, we get notified, we start building the app and we basically assemble everything that you might need for that deployment. So we figure out you might need certificates, we provision certificates, we figure out your app wants screenshots, we start building screenshots and then everything is neatly assembled. We send it over to the App Store for review. And from that moment on, it's basically up to Apple if they want to accept it in or not.

Mazen Chami:

That's incredible. So just to make sure I heard correctly, on a commit, let's just take for simplicity sake, someone who commits to main and they open a PR, and then they are good to go when they accept that PR on their main branch, right? So they get a build onto App Store Connect?

Cedric van Putten:

Yep. Yep. So you can configure the default branch to be main or you could configure it to be production. I think that's the most common one. But you can configure it to be whatever branch you want. And every time you commit something on there, it sends the new app version to the App Store.

Mazen Chami:

And so for a solo person, that is amazing because now they don't have to kind of, yes, they have to have their Mac to do the coding and whatnot. But now it's like, hey, commit and done.

Cedric van Putten:

You don't even have to have a Mac anymore.

Mazen Chami:

You don't even have to have a Mac anymore. That's even more crazy. But for a company who has like how, and I think we'll dig in later, but generally speaking, I would assume the whole setup is going to need to happen once. Is that correct?

Cedric van Putten:

That is correct.

Mazen Chami:

And then all of our developers can code away on whatever they're doing. And then when it's time to release, the one person who's overseeing that can just do their thing.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah. Yeah. And Launch is configurable from the Git repository. So you can configure what's the icon that Launch is going to show. You can configure what app name it's going to have, the screenshots, the different screenshots per language, what languages are there, privacy info, all of that can be configured and sent to launch through the Git repository. We don't have a UI for it yet, but it's all done through the app config or other kind of config files. And the nice part of it is you can also send pull requests to update these configurations. It can all be tracked.

Robin Heinze:

Just so cool. Everything. It's like so much of what we do now is like config files and it's all version control and that's what it should be.

Cedric van Putten:

It's also the nice thing about it is that you can roll back to an older version if you don't like the new icon. So you don't have to, I don't know, have all kinds of backup systems for the things that you send to Apple. You can just roll back. I mean, it's just Git.

Robin Heinze:

But when you say it rolls back, it doesn't literally roll back the version in the store, but it makes it easy to sort of go back to the last working state and be like, it's easy to launch that the next time.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean, we can still, I mean, Launch as well can version control the state of the app over time as well. So if Apple actually goes belly up and loses all our config, we can revert to the very first state that we uploaded for you or set up for you on launch.

Robin Heinze:

I mean, that's our worst nightmare is if for some reason the App Store Connect just loses our app. If there's a bug and our app just gets deleted. Like I had nightmares about that.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That must have been scary.

Robin Heinze:

There's so much work that goes into setting all of that up that the idea of it just all disappearing and having to recreate it is just terrifying. So that's really reassuring.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah. I mean, things can happen. Things do happen. I mean, we use APNS to send push notifications for the builds, for example. And Apple actually was like, okay, no, no, we don't want your messages on here anymore. We revoke your access. They basically deleted our APNS key. It's like, okay, well we can recreate it. It's fairly straightforward for us, but we did get locked out for a few days because we had to find out what happened. And I mean, as a company sending, we try to send a few messages, not that many, but over time, hundreds, maybe even thousands of messages daily. And I think they had something wrong that flagged us as a spammer, even though we don't spam anything. It's just our notifications. So yeah, things can happen. So it might not be you who did it wrong. It might be somebody else who flagged you accidentally for spamming and now you don't have access anymore. And those parts as well, Launch can help out with or at least help you to keep your sanity.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

Awesome. One of the things you might have mentioned earlier was Android, right? So Android's not currently supported, correct?

Cedric van Putten:

That is correct.

Mazen Chami:

So is Android, is the idea going to be similar on Android or is it going to be there's something else that you all foresee on Android?

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, I think maybe we skip a few steps in the middle, but the idea is going to be similar and we should launch Android to the Play Store. The Play Store is a little bit less complicated in terms of the stuff that you need to get configured. So Play Store is mostly about making sure that you have your screenshots, your app info, making sure that you have the proper rights to do it, and making sure you have a developer license. But the certificates are easier. Like there is only one signing certificate on Android that you just have to reuse every single time. And for iOS we have multiple types of certificates based on the type of app that you're sending over.

Robin Heinze:

So there's not the Provisioning Profile mess that exists with Apple.

Cedric van Putten:

There is not, or it is not as complex. And I think besides that, they got easier over time as well with the App Bundle where you basically get a certificate from the store as well to sign it afterwards. And that's sort of a newer way of doing Android submissions. I think that's available from 2018 or 2019. I think it's fairly standard, at least for Expo apps. And that's also, I guess, helps a lot as well.

Robin Heinze:

Is it safe to say, I mean I feel like we've all been waiting for Expo Launch and waiting to solve all of those hard problems. Is it safe to say that it's safe to now just assume that at Expo, at some point you guys will solve every single pain point for deploying an app? Like I can make that assumption safely, right?

Cedric van Putten:

I really, really hope so. And that's also my approach to all of this. I think it's realistic as well because if you look at the Expo trajectory over the past, I don't know, 10 years where Expo existed or maybe even earlier, it was all about trying to figure out which components should be simple by default, giving good default APIs. So you don't have to go low level to use the accelerometer. You can just use an Expo library and you might be good. And then slowly we streamlined the build, which is EAS Build. We streamlined the update. We streamlined a lot of the whole tooling experience with the debugging, running the builds, making things faster, etc. And we've been doing that for a while now. And then this year we've added EAS Hosting. And with hosting, we can also deploy your website or your Expo app as a website because it's now running on the web as well. I think that for all of those components, we can streamline things.

Robin Heinze:

Wait, can I just clarify? You said you can deploy your Expo app to the web?

Cedric van Putten:

With Expo, yeah. And the app, like the actual app itself might not work yet if you don't use Expo libraries yet, but you can now officially run your app as a website. We don't have a first class renderer for React Native yet, but for Expo Router, we've added that. So if you do have Expo Router on the web, it works the same as an iPad, like the same as React Native. So it's responsive. All of your links are working. All of your tabs are there. They persist your state if you have that configured. So it's like an SPA experience.

Robin Heinze:

So when did that come out?

Cedric van Putten:

That has been around, I think, for at least two years now.

Robin Heinze:

Okay. I just somehow missed that.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, we usually are trying to develop stuff behind the scenes and then we add things on top that are a little bit more public. So the public thing here was hosting. So it's like officially we can run it and we can deploy it for you so you don't have to worry about CDNs, et cetera. But before that, even before hosting, you could technically run Expo apps on the web. It's just you have to host it somewhere yourself.

Robin Heinze:

The things you miss when you don't read blog posts. I mean, I kind of knew it existed, but I don't think I realized, like I haven't been following closely enough to realize how good it's gotten.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, it's kind of good. The rendering part might not be good yet because, well, the first class React Native renderer for the web is not done yet, but it's kind of getting there. I know Evan is working on some stuff there, but we do have a router implementation and you can run it. And for small projects it should be pretty good.

Mazen Chami:

Nice. So bringing it back to Launch, or actually no, I think the part I kind of want to go into is kind of just like implementation. Like what went into kind of building Launch? Right. Any kind of like, you said it took, give or take two years is what I'm assuming just based on the hosting and all that kind of stuff.

Cedric van Putten:

I think that's right as well.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. So are there any lessons learned or any kind of like, you know, hiccups that you all went through to get to this state that you're in now?

Cedric van Putten:

I mean, more than enough. The fun thing about, well, fun thing, the thing about the App Store process that you have to follow is that it's really well defined. There is proper documentation. There are a lot of things that already exists to do stuff with it. But nobody or not a lot of people actually were successful in submitting apps automatically through the App Store API. And one of the main reasons is because of the whole submitting part is asynchronous. So you have to send the build to Apple. After the build is done, which could take, I don't know, two, three hours or more, you then have to process the build and create a new submission. So basically saying, OK, I want to now submit the stuff. It's kind of like the review process. And that whole thing is asynchronous. So you kind of have to send that request and you have to poll the app store connect API asking, hey, are we done yet? Are we done yet? And if you send too many of these requests, Apple gives you a 429 rate limit back and just blocks you off. And you have to make sure that you don't end up in a rate limit state from all of the things that you send to Apple. So it's like in order to make this thing fast, we want to poll a lot. But in order to make sure that it works all the time, we have to poll less. And finding that balance and finding those edge cases has taken a lot of time as well. But I'm pretty confident that the way we've set it up right now, the way we've organized the submission flow asynchronously, it's like the best way of doing it and we don't get any trouble.

Mazen Chami:

Interesting.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, it's fun to work with APIs that are rate limited and the numbers are not transparent. Apple doesn't really, or Apple does share some information about rate limits, but it's about rate limiting in general. It's like you can only make this many requests in a second. You only can make this many requests per minute. But if you try to make submissions, it's like very unclear how that works. And even Fastlane, the tool that we're basically trying to supersede, that tool also had issues with rate limiting and had some arbitrary numbers in it to wait a little bit, but not too much.

Robin Heinze:

I was going to ask about the APIs, how you're interfacing with Apple in this case. Has the level of access that Apple gives changed in the last 10 years or are you still working with the same APIs that we were using via Fastlane five or six years ago?

Cedric van Putten:

That's a good question. We actually have more capabilities right now than we had or used to have with Fastlane, especially around submission. And this is also something we're actively looking at now, but submission used to be done through the Transporter app, then you could do it from Xcode. Fastlane I think might have reverse engineered the Transporter app. But now with a more recent update from the App Store or App Store Connect API, they allow you to create a build upload through REST APIs. So that's skipping entirely the Transporter app, Xcode, even the requirement to run on macOS. So yeah, Apple is opening it up a little bit more, but we're just using the ASC APIs.

Robin Heinze:

So a lot of it probably was stuff that has existed for a long time. You're just kind of the first ones to take all of it from start to finish, do it more behind the scenes and really simplify the user experience versus what we used to have to do with Fastlane and Fastlane Match. I still have nightmares about trying to get my certs to work.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, exactly. We try to streamline any big problems for app development in any area of development. So we have the framework, which already is a big part of it, and we added C and G to, well keep it up to date at all times. Then we added the build tooling, or sorry, the build services like EAS Build, et cetera, that runs on modern fast hardware as opposed to some other Microsoft owned public companies that doesn't use fast hardware anyways. So that's exactly what we wanted to do with Launch as well. It's like getting it into the App Store is such a hard problem. Even today. You mentioned already the certificates, you have to have everything set up. You have to have a developer license and Launch won't fake that either. You have to have the developer license, but those are all hurdles that nobody really wants to do. You just want to build your app, you just want to focus on your project and make that the best thing in the world that you can get it. So yeah, it's an area that, I mean we've really tried to streamline and we are one of the few companies lucky enough to have all the pieces in place. So for us it just made sense to try it.

Robin Heinze:

It feels like a culmination. It really does.

Cedric van Putten:

Exactly.

Robin Heinze:

Of just so many years of working towards the same goal and now it's like, okay, let's connect all these pieces together and

Cedric van Putten:

Exactly. And Apple can do this as well. They have their Xcode Cloud builds, but even that still requires some form of setup even that can be better.

Robin Heinze:

And this just feels more React Native focused

Cedric van Putten:

And friendly. I mean, that's also one of the things that we wanted to try as soon as possible with Launch is that it's not just React Native either. It's like the system or the whole launch system that we added is so simple that we can extend it in different ways. We can extend it by adding different deployment targets. Right now we have the App Store and EAS Hosting for web, but we can definitely add the Tencent App Store if people want that. We can add, we're still talking with Google, but we can add the Play Store as well. We can add alternative app stores if we need to for European users. But besides that, we can also just slap in a new framework. And that's something we wanted to try as well. So during Halloween we actually added Flutter support and people thought we were joking and then

Robin Heinze:

You should have done it on April 1st and been like, actually thought you were,

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, we were a little bit too late for that, but I think Halloween was the next big thing because it's scary,

Robin Heinze:

Right? Because scary, you're right. That's perfect.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, no, people were really genuinely surprised and thought we were joking up until we actually had to get the Flutter account to tweet out as well that that is now possible in order for people to believe it.

Robin Heinze:

Wow,

Cedric van Putten:

That's

Robin Heinze:

Funny.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, good joke now. Yeah, yeah.

Robin Heinze:

But it just proves how versatile it is.

Mazen Chami:

Exactly.

Robin Heinze:

It's not tied into React Native,

Cedric van Putten:

It's not tied into React Native. It's not tied even into Expo either. We just wanted to build whatever projects we get that we know about, and then get that to whatever apps that the user wants that we know about. That's the whole idea.

Mazen Chami:

Awesome. Cool. So we've talked about the tech and Android coming soon. What else? What's the future of Launch look like? What's coming down the pipeline?

Cedric van Putten:

So first is some work that we need to do to stabilize the integration that we have with Rapid, being able to add more of these type of users where we can integrate into their platform for their users as well, but to really democratize, to really allow anyone to build whatever they want and submit it to their stores. But we're also not done on the App Store yet. We have added support for app groups, widgets, live activities. We don't have support yet for APNS, but that's also coming. And then we even have support for app clips as well, or it's currently in the testing phase. Those are the really fun things that are extremely hard to do if you want to do it yourself and configure everything manually. So for example, with an app clip, you have to have your app, you have to have the app clip target, then you have to define the relation of the app clip towards the app. But then on top of that, you also need to configure your domain to be pointing to your app through the well-known associations or site associations. And then besides that, you also have to configure the app's relation to the domain via associated domains. If we can automate all of that, which we're actually pretty close to, then anyone can make a website and an app clip at the same time without any problems.

Robin Heinze:

Amazing. Would that also work just with Universal Links? Even if you're not doing an app clip, if you just want to automate setting up Universal Links between your website and your app.

Cedric van Putten:

So we don't have all the pieces yet to actually get that realized. That's also why we're working with a few, just a handful of partners at first to figure out if it's possible in the first place. Let's say you use Launch from your public GitHub repo. We only launch a single target every time, but in order to do this, we have to be able to launch multiple targets like one to EAS Hosting one to the App Store and then link everything together. We don't have that yet, so that piece might not be possible just yet. But for integrators, they might actually have that already or they have more of a sense of, hey, this is a useless project. We can configure this on the project level, configure it in Expo, the code, send it to Launch, which detects that it's configured, therefore we will set it up in the App Store, et cetera. So we can actually try and finish that whole flow. Not right now, but we're actively working towards that. And then of course we are also looking into adding more frameworks, more popular frameworks as well. I'm not going to say which one, but you kind of know which one.

Mazen Chami:

React Native. Got it, okay.

Robin Heinze:

Read between the lines folks. Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

That's exciting. Yeah, that's all. I mean it's stuff that I feel like as React Native developers we thought was so far out, and just to hear that you all are kind of putting the pieces together and getting it closer and closer together is very helpful.

Robin Heinze:

Well, it's being done in a way that you guys have the resources to go and work through these obstacles that an ordinary app developer wouldn't be able to do. Figuring out how to get the right services to talk to each other and the right APIs and stuff that we wouldn't be able to go do ourselves. And so it's really nice having a player in the community like Expo eliminating pain points all over the place. So Universal Links, that's the one that I want you to fix next, because boy, that was painful the last time I had to do Universal Links.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, I mean even that we're talking about for years now, and again, we didn't have EAS Hosting at that time.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, exactly. So you're just adding little pieces to the puzzle all the time and I can see a future where you streamlined every piece.

Mazen Chami:

I hope we get there.

Robin Heinze:

Cool.

Mazen Chami:

I know you guys

Robin Heinze:

Will. Hey, keep doing what you're doing. We love everything that Expo comes out with.

Mazen Chami:

Thank you.

Robin Heinze:

Thank you.

Mazen Chami:

For our listeners, where can our listeners tune in and find out when anything comes out soon? I assume your blog post is usually when you'd post these updates?

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, if there are major announcements, we will write up a blog post. We will do some tweets. If people still call it Twitter, I'm one of them.

Robin Heinze:

Everyone still calls it Twitter that I know of. I still call it Twitter. I go to twitter.com. I think I said this last episode.

Cedric van Putten:

Oh, I think they might have blocked it in my region. That doesn't work anymore for me. Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

Like the twitter.com redirect.

Cedric van Putten:

Yeah, it just keeps on redirecting you. It will just say too many redirects,

Robin Heinze:

So.

Cedric van Putten:

Oh wow.

Robin Heinze:

That's so disappointing. I refuse to type x.com.

Cedric van Putten:

It's shorter though. It's faster.

Robin Heinze:

It is shorter, but I'll never do it.

Mazen Chami:

Alright, thank you Cedric, really appreciate it. Thanks for giving us all that insight and hopefully our listeners gain something from this new tool that you all have.

Cedric van Putten:

Thanks for being

Robin Heinze:

Here.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. Robin, do you have a dad joke to send us

Robin Heinze:

Out? I'm going to do one of Jamon's because he's not here and that just feels appropriate. I'll never again donate to people who collect money for marathons. They just take my money and run.

Mazen Chami:

Nice. Alright. See you all next time. Bye.

Robin Heinze:

Alright, bye everyone. Alright, thanks

Jed Bartausky:

As always, thanks to our editor, Todd Werth, our assistant editors, Jed Bartausky and Tyler Williams, our marketing and episode release coordinator, Justin Huskey, and our guest coordinator, Mazen Chami. Our producers and hosts are Jamon Holmgren, Robin Heinze, and Mazen Chami. Thanks to our sponsor, Infinite Red. Check us out at infinite.red/radio. A special thanks to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe to React Native Radio on all the major podcasting platforms.