While I don’t use Expo in any production apps, I can understand why people gravitate towards it. The biggest problem with React Native is that the ecosystem is fragmented. React Native is just a core library for building a mobile app. You still need to add dozens of other third party packages to make a real app. Even navigation is a third party package. And how are you supposed to know which packages to choose if you’re just starting out? Expo eases this burden by providing a curated set of packages that add the functionality required to make a real app. However I often find that you eventually hit the limitations of the included packages and need to eject to a bare workflow, at which point the benefit of Expo diminishes. But I see why people use it in the first place.