Expo Tutorial: Build Your First App

Nine chapters, one app, and no detours. Expo's own tutorial walks you through building StickerSmash — a small image-editing toy where you pick a photo from your library, drop emoji stickers on it, drag them around, and save the result to your camera roll. The same codebase runs on Android, iOS and the web, which is the whole point Expo is trying to make.

It's written and maintained by the Expo team, so it tracks the current recommended stack rather than whatever was fashionable two years ago. That means Expo Router for navigation, TypeScript from chapter one, and the modern config-plugin approach to native permissions. The tutorial says it is self-paced and can take up to two hours; in practice you should budget more if you're also installing Xcode or Android Studio for the first time.

What you actually build

• Project setup with TypeScript and the Expo CLI
• Bottom tab navigation via Expo Router
• Flexbox layout for the editing screen
• Picking an image from the device media library
• A modal sticker picker built on Modal and FlatList
• Drag and double-tap gestures on the sticker
• Taking a screenshot of the composed view and saving it
• Platform-specific branches for the web build
• Status bar, splash screen and app icon configuration

The part that trips people up

The last two chapters are where the cross-platform promise gets tested. Screenshot capture and media-library saving don't behave identically on web, and the tutorial handles it by branching on platform rather than pretending the difference away — honest, but it means the app you finish with is subtly three apps. You'll also hit the environment wall before you hit any React Native concept: getting a simulator running is genuinely the hardest step here, and the tutorial mostly waves at other pages for that.

The other limitation is scope. There's no data fetching, no persistence beyond the camera roll, no authentication, no testing. You finish knowing how to lay out a screen and wire a gesture, not how to structure an app.

Who it's for — and who should skip it

Reach for this if you already write React on the web and want to know what changes on mobile. The JSX will look familiar, the styling won't, and two hours is a cheap way to find out whether that trade is acceptable to you. Skip it if you've never used React at all — the tutorial assumes components and state as background knowledge and will not slow down for you. Skip it too if you're evaluating bare React Native without Expo, since roughly half of what you learn here is Expo-specific tooling.

Our take

The best two hours you can spend before deciding whether to commit to React Native. Our reservation is that it's a demo, not a course: StickerSmash is deliberately small enough to avoid every hard question about architecture, and finishing it can leave you more confident than you've earned. Treat it as a guided tour, then go build something with a network request in it.