Set up an existing Expo Go project to use Development Builds.

Expo Go is a Sandbox Environment designed for learning prototyping and getting started with mobile development quickly. The major limitation of Expo Go is that you are completely unable to add or edit any native code in your app. This might be a trivial limitation at the start of your project when you're prototyping and experimenting, but most production quality apps will eventually need to have more control over their native app bundles.

This is where development builds come in. A development build is basically your own customised version of Expo Go: you build the native side of your app yourself and get to have all the control over what libraries and configurations are included.

Thanks to CNG (with prebuild) the native projects are generated automatically based off of your app config and package.json.

📝 Expo Go

📝 Development Builds

📝 Continuous Native Generation (CNG)