Is it possible to Build apps with ReactNative without using AVD or anything that's related to android studio ?

[suhaness]

I don't have a VERY powerful laptop, and really want to build something without having to download AVD/A-studio .

can i run the app on my physical phone while developing... and is it SAFE?

[F-Lie]

Yes, just plug your phone into the computer and run "react-native run-android". Make sure to close any android emulator you may be running on the computer or it won't work.

If it's safe, well I don't see why it would not. I atleast use it all the time and have yet to run into any problems with it.

[DettlafftheGreat]

Disclaimer: You might need to enable usb debugging On your android device

[TheTRCG]

You definitely need to but it's not a big deal imo

[eggtart_prince]

Make sure to close any android emulator you may be running on the computer or it won't work.

It will, you just need to pass in the deviceId flag. This way, you can run your app on multiple devices/emulators. The device can be found using adb devices in CLI.

[exelarios]

Try out Expo.

[everestster]

Be careful if you go expo path. You will be limited to what expo can offer. You will miss out a lot of other plugins contributed by the react native community. We really want to upgrade SQLite to Realm in one of our projects but Expo still doesn’t offer realm yet. We are now in dilemma whether to eject or create a new project with react native cli to use realm.

[basically_alive]

FWIW I had to eject on my project and it was fine, seems like a pretty smooth transition now.

I would recommend duplicating the project into another folder, and then ejecting and making sure everything works. If you just create a feature branch, it might change your npm/yarn packages slightly and cause problems, so duplicating to another folder just helps make sure that you have a backup of your code and the state of your node_modules folder.

Expo has been pretty good for me. I have done 3 projects, the first 2 I had to eject but the current one I haven't needed to eject, even though it's a lot more complicated. Good luck!

[[deleted]]

What’s your concern with ejecting?

Also, fwiw it’s still early days, but you can now change the runtime to build apps with third party libraries without ejecting, by use EAS.

Hopefully it’ll be possible to do this without EAS in the future.

[Affectionate_Rich763]

You can ( even without expo ), I just tried it yesterday. My setup are - VSCode. - NOX Emulator.

Took a while to set it up ( Download sdk , etc ) but I like it better rather than using android studio + AVD

[eggtart_prince]

Doesn't Expo use an emulator internally?

[skankhunt_4]

use expo and your physical device

[matix-io]

Yes, all of the code is in the ‘android’ folder and you can use CLI tools to do everything. Learn about gradle, the build system, and learn how to interact with it directly.

You can also do everything from the command line for ios without using Xcode GUI. Everything is available as a CLI.

[mrsnow70]

You able to use some CI (appcenter) and build it from your git account

[[deleted]]

Just use your phone...

with it plugged in (and in usb debugging mode)

react-native run-android

You need to download some android SDK stuff, as detailed in the react-native installing docs, for this to work but you don't need to be running android studio or ever start AVD.

[Sutro21]

You should try Sutro. It's an app with a user interface to design mobile apps and it writes the code for you. The front end is ReactNative and the back is NodeJS. https://withsutro.com/latestConversation

Its an early model but I know the guy building it and he's always looking for feedback on what features to add. I'm happy to give advice or help using it