How to Build a React Native App

In this article, we will learn how to build a React Native app.

Prerequisites#

Before we start building a React Native app, make sure you have the following installed on your machine:

Expo is a CLI tool that helps you build, deploy, and share React Native apps.

npm install -g expo-cli

expo --version

Watchman is a tool by Facebook for watching changes in the filesystem. It is used by React Native to watch for changes in the project files.

To install Watchman, run the following command:

brew install watchman

To create a new React Native app, run the following command:

expo init my-app

npx create-expo-app@latest my-app -t

This command will create a new React Native app named my-app.

To run the app, navigate to the project directory and run the following command:

cd my-app
npx expo start --web

This command will start the development server and open the Expo DevTools in your default browser.

To run the app on an emulator, click on the Run on Android device/emulator or Run on iOS simulator in the Expo DevTools.

To build the app, run the following command:

expo build:android

This command will build the app for Android.

To build the app for iOS, run the following command:

expo build:ios

In this article, we learned how to build a React Native app. Now you can start building your own React Native apps.