I tried to live an entire day inside apps built with Expo. Here's where it broke.

There are thousands of apps on the App Store and Google Play running on Expo's open source tooling. That's a big number, but it doesn't tell you much. What I actually wanted to know: do those apps cover a full day, start to finish, without me reaching for anything else on my phone? So I ran the experiment. One day, Expo apps only. By breakfast I'd paid a celebrity to record a video. By lunch I was generating an app from my phone. By late afternoon I was sweating through a shirt. By bedtime I was too tired to feel smug about any of it. Short answer: yes, it works. The longer answer is more useful, because the moments where the day fell apart are exactly the moments where somebody should go build something. Morning Rise, sleep tracking and energy forecasts Espresso, news from The Economist WeatherWise, forecast and live radar AirNow, air quality index from the US EPA Delish, recipes with video steps First app of the day was Rise, a sleep tracker that also predicts when you'll get energy spikes and when your body wants to wind down. Genuinely useful for planning a day this ridiculous. Next, Espresso, from The Economist. News in small, fast hits, which is the whole premise. Content-heavy apps like this have always been a strong spot for Expo, and it shows: an app like this lives on navigation and linking, which is exactly the job Expo Router is built for. I needed to know if the weather and air quality would cooperate with my afternoon plans. WeatherWise covered the forecast and live radar, feeling like the pro version of the weather app that already ships on your phone. For air quality I used AirNow, from the US EPA. It gives you the current index and the outlook for the week. The UI could use some attention, and I'll say that plainly, but it works, and there's something quietly great about a federal agency reaching for Expo to help people figure out if it's safe to go outside during wildfire season. I'm the cook in my house, so I opened Delish for dinner ideas. Hand-picked recipes with real videos and step-by-step instructions, no eight-paragraph story about someone's grandmother sitting on top of the ingredient list. Do not browse it hungry. The messaging gap Cameo, personalized videos from celebrities Normally around here I'd text my wife what I'm making for dinner. This is where the day fell apart, because there isn't really a messaging app built with Expo. We use iMessage, and iMessage was off the table. The problem with messaging apps is that shipping one isn't enough. Both sides of the conversation need it. I can install an app for myself, but I can't install one on my wife's expectations about how she wants to be reached. That's a real gap in what's out there. So I got someone else to text her instead. Cameo runs on Expo, and their team has a case study about scaling through a stretch of hyper-growth on it. Cameo is the app where you pay a celebrity to record a personal video for someone. My wife and I watch a lot of Food Network, so I tracked down a Food Network star who could deliver same-day. Was this the intended use case? No. Was it cheap? Also no. Afternoon Tesla, navigation and car controls Tommy's Express, drive-through car wash Replit, coding with a built-in agent Mercari, second-hand marketplace I found a car wash running on Expo, then realized I had no way to get there since there's no Expo maps app either. The Tesla app has navigation built in and also controls the car itself, which solved two problems with one tap. Once I got there, the Tommy's Express app let me use the car wash without talking to another human. Pull into the lane the app tells you, it reads your plate, it already has your plan and card on file, gate opens. If you're an introvert, this is close to a religious experience. Then I set up at a cafe to get some actual work done, using the Replit app. A few people in our YouTube comments have asked for a mobile app to check EAS builds and workflows on the go, and this felt like the right day to start one. Replit has a coding agent built in, so I had it generate a first draft. I also spent some time in Mercari, a second-hand marketplace where people sell the good stuff out of their closets. My feed that day was, for reasons I can't explain, an oops-all-hats situation. Found one that's extremely Silicon Valley coded, so I might go back for it. Evening Runna, personalized running plans Rover, pet sitting and dog walking Once Upon, printed photo books Voidpet Garden, self-reflection as a game Book of the Month, a short list of books to read I have a race coming up this fall, so I used Runna to track a training run. Tell it a bit about yourself and it writes a personalized plan, whether you're training for your first 5K or something longer. This is where the sweating happened. After dinner I walked the dog, which reminded me we need a sitter for an upcoming trip. Rover is a genuinely nice app for finding people to look after your pet. When I lived in New York City, finding boarding with actual availability was hard. The sitters I found through Rover were kind enough to my dog that I'd book them again without thinking twice. I also used Once Upon to turn photos out of my library into a printed book. It has short videos showing what hardcover versus softcover and matte versus glossy actually look like, a detail most apps skip entirely, then let me drag photos around until the layout felt right. To unwind, I played Voidpet Garden, made by Ben Awad. It turns self-reflection into a game: you catch creatures, tend a garden, fight the occasional battle, and along the way it asks how your day went and how things made you feel. We could use more of that. Last thing before bed was the Book of the Month Club app. Walking into a bookstore means facing a few thousand choices at once. This trims it to five or seven. I picked one called The Last Contract of Esequibo, mostly for the tagline: "Live by the code or die by the knife." Felt about right for development life these days. Loose ends Three things resolved after the day was already over. The Cameo video didn't arrive that evening. Celebrities, it turns out, have schedules. It showed up a few days later, we loved it, and now I owe my wife that dinner all over again. The photo book arrived, and it's genuinely nice. And the EAS companion app I started in Replit made real progress. I showed it around internally, more people got excited than I expected, and we're now actively working on it. Expect something to look at later this year. What the gaps tell you The three places the day broke were messaging, maps, and camera, and they're really the same gap wearing different clothes. Messaging is hard because it needs two people to adopt it at once. Maps and camera are hard for the opposite reason: your phone already ships with a good-enough version, and good-enough is genuinely difficult to beat. Which is exactly why these categories are worth building into. One of the goals at Expo is letting more people build for mobile. The screen in your pocket is the one most of us stare at all day, for better or worse, and everyone should be able to build for it. Start something If one of those gaps sounds like your idea, here's the whole path in: the getting started guide walks you to a build on a real device, and EAS Build takes it to the app stores without you ever opening Xcode or Android Studio. If you get stuck along the way, come find us in Discord. This post is based on content from the Expo blog. Follow @expo for more React Native content.