React Native Everywhere: Expo ( Android + Web + iOS ) + Tauri ( Desktop )

React Native Everywhere

Expo ( Android + Web + iOS ) + Tauri ( Desktop ) = ♥

What is RNE?

RNE is a template I made to help me build Beautiful, Efficient, and write once run everywhere apps with Expo (React Native) building to Android, iOS and Web along with Desktop support using Tauri. This template includes some common libraries and configurations that I find myself using in almost all React Native project.

Beware: I am using libraries and configuration the way I like the most, your choices and the most efficient way to do it might differ.

Whats included

The most relevant list of packages included in the template are as follows:

Using the template

To Get started click on that Use this template button in the repository and create your own repository.

Initial changes

We have to make some initial changes before we start building our app, please follow below steps carefully:

  • change all the relevant fields to your project specific details in ./app.json and ./src-tauri/tauri.conf.json
  • change the app icons in assets, namely the adaptive-icon.png, favicon.png, icon.png and splash.png. Tauri specific icons will be generated using ./assets/icon.png, once you have added the new assets run yarn tauri icon ./assets/icon.png this will generate the asset icons required by our desktop builds.

Now its time you build your app :>

Working

Their are multiple scripts in the package.json, most of them are just the default once that come with tauri and expo so I won’t be documenting them. Building your Android, iOS and Web app using this template is same when using just expo so I will be skipping that. You can find below the general flow of development for desktop apps though.

For developing desktop app their are actually two steps:

  • tauri depends on a web bundler like webpack so we first start our expo web development server using yarn web and we leave it running
  • open another terminal and now we can run yarn desktop that will start our tauri app in development mode

For building desktop app we employee a similar approach:

  • we first build our web version of the app using yarn build-web
  • once the web version is build we use tauri to package the web app using yarn build-desktop

Issues

Enjoy the errors they are a feature ? ( kidding open an issue/improvements here)

What to expect

This template will allow you to build beautiful React Native apps quickly for almost all platforms ( Android + iOS + Web + Linux + Windows + MacOS ). For platform specific APIs on Android, iOS and Web things need to be handled using Expo, whereas for desktop we’ll be using what’s provided by Tauri. This template is fast and reliable and I have run the light house test on it (results below). You can find the release builds for the template in Github Release Page

Android

Web

Mac

Linux

Debian

AppImage

Made with ♥ in India

GitHub

View Github