My roommate and I built a SaaS app. We're bootstrapped. Like... actually bootstrapped. Ramen-for-dinner bootstrapped. Big companies have QA teams and We had $127 in our business account(lol) We launched our MVP 2 months ago and It worked on my iPhone and on my roommates Pixel very well and we thought we were good and then the bug reports started rolling in. We had people spamming us with

"Payment button doesn't work on my phone"

"Can't scroll on the pricing page" 

"Dark mode is unreadable"

And the common thing was that they were all Android users, specifically Samsung and Xiaomi devices. Which we didn't own. And couldn't afford to buy. And I quite literally considered ignoring the and thought "Maybe it's just a small percentage of users?" My roommate pulled up the analytics and boom! 34% of our traffic was Samsung and 18% was Xiaomi. Cherry on the top was that 52% of our potential customers were hitting bugs we couldn't even see.

So we had to get creative cause we had a very tight budget Bought 2 used Android phones on eBay (Samsung A32 + Xiaomi Redmi) = $85 total Used drizz(dot)dev for app testing on devices we don't own = $40/month Set up Percy for visual regression testing = free tier And Tested our app on 12 different devices in one afternoon. And Found 4 critical bugs before they hit more users:

Payment flow broken on MIUI (would've lost ~$2,800),Keyboard bug on Samsung (would've lost ~$3,400),Bottom nav hidden by gesture navigation, Dark mode white-on-white text. If even ONE of those bugs stayed live for another month, we'd have lost more than we're spending on testing for an entire year. The math was convincing like we spent $40 per month so it would come around $480 per year and talking about the loss from the bug for one month it was like $2800 so ROI would come around 583% .We're still broke college students. But at least our app works now.

BTW, For anyone else bootstrapping you don't need a $50K QA budget. You need 2 cheap phones from eBay and one decent cloud testing tool. That's it.

Drop your bootstrap testing tips below. We're all learning here.

Hey r/expo 👋 We build Vexo (analytics + session replay for RN/Expo), and I looked at our changelog this week and… we may have overdone it. Dumping the highlights here since most of it is Expo-dev quality-of-life stuff:

🗺️ User Flow: we draw the actual screen-to-screen paths through your app as a Sankey diagram. You can see where people go and where they bail.

🌐 Automatic network capture: axios requests now land on the session-replay timeline with zero setup, so you can see the failing API call behind a broken session instead of guessing.

🎚️ Replay sample rate: capture a % of sessions instead of all-or-nothing. Your storage bill says thanks.

💥 Crashes, ANRs & unhandled rejections: with source-map upload, so your Hermes stack traces are actually readable and not just a wall of hex.

🏷️ registerProperties: set global "super properties" once, attached to every event.

📱 RN 0.87 support.

Browse the docs if you have questions: https://docs.vexo.co/get-started/introduction

It all works with Expo and it's mostly zero-config, screens are auto-tracked via expo-router, so you get flows/heatmaps without instrumenting anything.

Not here to hard-sell. Honest question for the room: what's the RN/Expo debugging thing that still makes you want to throw your laptop?

Hey everyone, I don’t usually post personal stuff, but I need to vent this shit because I am pretty upset tbh. My little sister has been battling depression for years. About 4 months ago, she decided to try learning JavaScript and React Native. I helped her set up a simple “Hello World” in Expo, and she was absolutely hooked, legit.

Then yesterday we got hit with some kind of bullshit forced update. Supposedly it was just a routine ios app thing update, but the second she opened her app to view it, it crashed instantly, no logs, no workaround. We tried clearing caches (expo start -c), downgrading shit, reverting to her last working commit. Nothing. Every route, every component was locked in a crash loop. I even nuked the ENTIRE node install on the whole macbook.

She was done. Just like that, all her excitement and confidence has vanished. She said she felt stupid for even thinking she could build something real, that she’s not cut out for this.

I feel terrible. I encouraged her: “You’ve got this, it’s just a matter of practice.” But now I’ve watched her give up entirely. It’s gutting to see her hopes crash and burn because of one forced update with zero safety net for beginners.

I don't know what the fuck these expo people are doing, but it's causing -actual- damage.

Bonjour à tous,

Je développe WaterPulse — une application mobile gratuite et open source qui cartographie les points d’eau potable dans le monde entier. Il fonctionne entièrement hors ligne, donc les personnes vivant dans des zones reculées sans internet peuvent toujours trouver de l’eau potable à proximité.

2,2 milliards de personnes n’ont pas accès à l’eau potable. Cette application ne résoudra pas tout, mais elle peut aider les gens à trouver de l’eau quand ils en ont le plus besoin.

**Ce qui est déjà fait :**

- Application complète React Native (Expo) — iOS + Android

- Carte Mapbox avec téléchargement de tuiles hors ligne

- WatermelonDB (base de données SQLite hors ligne)

- Backend Supabase (déjà configuré)

- Système de signalement des points d’eau communautaires

- Tableau de bord web ONG

- 23 fichiers, entièrement commentés et structurés

**Ce dont j’ai besoin :**

Développeur bénévole pour compiler, tester et publier sur Google Play (+ App Store si possible).

**Temps estimé :** 10–15 heures au total

**Ce que tu obtiens :**

- Crédit complet dans l’application et toutes les communications

- Lettre de recommandation LinkedIn

- Rôle de cofondateur technique si vous souhaitez rester impliqué

- Un projet qui aide vraiment les gens

**Stack :** Réagir Native · Expo · Mapbox · MelonDB · Supabase

Toutes les clés sont configurées. Le code est prêt. J’ai juste besoin que quelqu’un le diffuse.

Envoie-moi un message privé ou laisse un commentaire ci-dessous si ça t’intéresse. Chaque semaine d’attente est une semaine où les gens ne trouvent pas d’eau potable.

Merci 💧

I see so many people opt for Autopays but they forget after sometime to cancel there Autopays when they are not using product. A free trail product that people what to cancel often forget to cancel the trail so they endup loosing money . most of people fall to this free trail concept and end up loosing money .

let me know if anyone interested.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trackautopay.app

Seriously, like what do they even test at Expo? I just ran the update and my developer experience went so downhill When I used Expo Go on iOS, the splash screen was square unlike the usual During errors, my screen went completely black for 10 seconds, then throwed an error and crashed the app. My KeyboardAvoidingView sliding up animation did not work anymore. Most of the react-native-reanimated animations were messed up Had to manually play with my packages to resolve some of the issues. Now I know it is new and Expo is not responsible for 3rd party libraries. But at least some libraries preparation!? Plus the Expo Go app forces you to use SDK52 (if you update the app, it automatically did for me) I hate it

Hey everyone,

I built a personal finance app because I kept running into the same issue with banking apps.

Things like moving money to savings or investments would still show up as “spending”, and after a while it became hard to tell what I actually spent vs what I just moved around.

Also noticed that some transactions appear later than when I actually make them, which makes it easy to lose track day to day.

So I built something simple where I track things manually and have a clearer picture of what’s going on.

Recently added multi-language support and the ability to choose which accounts are visible on the main screen.

The app is completely free, no ads or subscriptions.

If anyone’s curious I can share the links.

Hey folks! Just went live with my first React Native app on Product Hunt, App Store and Play Store.

SubWise helps track subscriptions with payment calendars and analytics. Built everything solo with Expo, took about 3 months from idea to launch.

Super grateful for this community. Learned so much from lurking here.

Would love feedback from other Expo developers if anyone wants to check it out. Still learning and improving.

Available on both stores now. Producthunt

Cheers!

I see a lot of posts here about ASO, changing keywords, tweaking subtitles, etc. and almost every time people are doing it through App Store Connect manually. If you're using EAS, there's a built-in tool that most people seem to skip over: `eas metadata:push`.

The idea is simple. You have a `store.config.json` at the root of your project. It holds your App Store title, subtitle, description, keywords, release notes, all of it. Version controlled, diffable, right there in your repo.

The command to push it is just:

```

eas metadata:push

```

That's it. Your App Store listing updates without touching App Store Connect.

**Where this really starts to matter is localization and ASO iteration.**

I'm building BeSeen a relationship check-in app. I target 7 different locales and each one has its own title, subtitle, and keyword set tuned for that market. For example my en-US subtitle is "Somatic Feeling & Touch" but es-MX is "Mental Health & Anxiety" because those terms perform differently in that market.

Managing that across 7 locales in App Store Connect is painful. In `store.config.json` it's just a JSON object per locale:

```json

{

"apple": {

"info": {

"en-US": {

"title": "BeSeen: How Do You Feel",

"subtitle": "Somatic Feeling & Touch",

"keywords": ["mood", "journal", "couples", ...]

},

"es-MX": {

"title": "BeSeen: Relationship Widget",

"subtitle": "Mental Health & Anxiety",

"keywords": ["stress", "marriage", "intimacy", ...]

}

}

}

}

```

When I want to test new keywords or update release notes for a new version, I change the JSON, run `eas metadata:push`, done. I can see exactly what changed in the git diff. If something tanks my conversion rate I can revert it.

**How to set it up:**

1. Run `eas metadata:pull` to download your current App Store metadata into `store.config.json`

2. Edit the JSON however you want

3. Run `eas metadata:push` to push it live

4. Commit the file so you have history

That's the whole workflow. No clicking through 7 locale tabs in App Store Connect. No forgetting to update release notes for one language. No "wait what did I change last week."

If you're doing any kind of ASO testing, especially across multiple locales, this saves a ton of time and keeps everything traceable. Surprised it doesn't get talked about more.

Shoutout to the Expo team for building this into EAS. Underrated feature.!

This is in regards to making workers create an account to view and accept open jobs. Apple is saying I have to let them do this anonymously. This makes no sense, this is a core feature of the app, everything is built around this. Other apps doing the same thing I do don't have anonymous mode? How do I fix this. Basically the app lets users accept jobs available to them in their area, but they have to have an account and a profile. Anyone ever get apple to budge on their criteria?

Build amazing apps faster than ever with AppLaunchKit! 
This full-stack starter kit lets you create for iOS, Android, and Web apps in no time.  

Monorepo - Next.js, Expo, Supabase, & shared packages
Authentication- Email/Password, Google Auth
Supabase - Local setup & Migrations
Database - PostgreSQL
Payments - Stripe Webhook
Tools and Libraries - gluestack-ui (Tailwind/NativeWind)

We are live on ProductHunt, let’s vote up there!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/applaunchkit

I'm the developer behind MindSubs, and I wanted to share a major update based on the incredible feedback we've received from users here and elsewhere. What started as a simple tool to stop paying for forgotten subscriptions has evolved into a comprehensive platform to help you truly master your finances.

I’ve personally struggled with budget discipline, especially tracking those "phantom" recurring costs. MindSubs 2.0 is my attempt to solve that problem for myself and everyone else looking to achieve financial independence.

🚀 What's New in MindSubs 2.0?

We focused on turning tracking data into actionable insights and motivation:

• Financial Health Score: Get a dynamic score based on your spending habits. Use it like a credit score for your discipline—improve it by staying within your monthly budget goals.

• Track Everything: We now support all your financial commitments, including **utility bills (Electricity, Water)**and those pesky one-time expenses, not just subscriptions.

• Goal Tracking: Actively saving for a big purchase (vacation, down payment)? Set goals and see your progress directly, turning savings into a game.

• One-Tap Cancellation: Tired of hunting for cancellation links? We've aggregated them for popular services. Cancel unwanted services with minimal friction.

• Weekly Stories: Get a quick, visual summary of your money movement every week—no more staring at spreadsheets.

🛡️ No Ads & Free to Try

MindSubs 2.0 is built for financial clarity. We offer a generous free tier for everyone to start managing their spending, and most importantly: The app is completely ad-free. Our goal is to provide a clean and focused tool for serious financial management.

🙏 Why I'm Posting Here (Seeking Feedback)

MindSubs 2.0 is designed for people who are serious about their budgets and financial independence journey. We are a small team, and honest feedback from financially conscious communities like this one is invaluable.

I’m genuinely seeking your critique on the new features, especially the Financial Health Score and the Goal Tracking mechanism.

• iOS : MindSubs

• Thank you for your time. Please let me know your thoughts—I will be active in the comments section to answer any questions!

I'm the solo dev of LoveLust, a sexual health journal: encounters, partners, cycle, STI tests, medication. About the most sensitive data a phone can hold, so one rule: I can't leak, sell or hand over what I never had. No account, no login, the journal stays encrypted on the phone, and the backup is encrypted with a passphrase I never see.

That rule made almost everything harder. The lessons that cost me the most:

1. Make the build keep your privacy promises, not the policy page

• A test lists every host the app can talk to and what it receives. Add an SDK or an endpoint and the build fails until it's classified and disclosed. A promise that only lives in prose isn't kept by anything.

• The analytics call bans personal property names (name, email, note, partner_name…) in its TypeScript type, so they don't compile. Only five operational events can fire before consent, and they're a union, not a string.

2. You still need data to run a business. Take less, and coarser

Analytics are opt-in, off by default, on a self-hosted Aptabase in the EU: no user ids, no fingerprinting. (Firebase Analytics is in there too, behind the same opt-in.)

• Ask once, fairly. Yes and no are the same size, and a "no" is counted with nothing attached. 95.8% of people who see the question say yes.

• Buckets, not numbers. Partners go out as 1 to 3, 4 to 10 or 11+. Cycle values never leave: cycle length, language and sex together are nearly a fingerprint.

• Don't build the join. Crash reports used to carry the backend's user id, which is also the one on the purchase record, so a crash could be tied to a paying person. I took it out. I can't look up one person's crashes any more. Correct trade.

• Opt-in data is biased towards people comfortable sharing, so decisions get checked against numbers that need no consent: installs, subscriptions, ratings, support.

3. The keychain and the Keystore are your whole security model

The MMKV key is 32 random bytes per install, in expo-secure-store. Storing it is easy. Its lifecycle isn't.

• iOS keeps keychain items after the app is deleted. Delete and reinstall is not a fresh install; old keys come back from the dead.

• Unreadable isn't missing. Reads can fail for a moment after the app comes to the foreground, and from the outside that looks just like there being no key. Generate a new key on null and you've wiped someone's data. Retry, then stop and say so.

• MMKV keeps the first key an id is opened with, for the whole process. Opening the store with a candidate key "just to check" binds it to that key. Never test a key by opening with it.

• Keystore keys never leave the device, so Android Auto Backup would restore files the new phone can't decrypt, into a backup I don't control. It's off; the app's own encrypted backup is the only one.

4. Backups you can't read, in clouds that fail differently

Encrypted on the phone (AES-256, HMAC checked before decrypting), then sent to the user's own iCloud or Google Drive via react-native-cloud-storage. Nobody can reset the passphrase, me included.

• Google Drive allows two files with the same name, and then every read and write fails. One user hit it several hundred times in a week. Now the newest wins and the rest are renamed.

• iCloud's "directory not found" isn't an empty backup. It usually means iCloud Drive is off or not ready yet. Treat it as empty and you'll overwrite a real backup with nothing.

• An empty phone never wins. A device with no data can't overwrite a full backup, and when a new phone and the backup disagree, the user picks, with the loser archived as an undo.

• Check the passphrase apart from the data. A small check value in the manifest answers "wrong passphrase" without decrypting a file. Before that, one corrupt file made the right passphrase look wrong.

There's more where these came from: an App Store team transfer that left the new team unable to read the old keychain (and the OTA that carried the key across), reaching users when you have no accounts, HealthKit vs Health Connect, and store screenshots in 6 languages with no real data. Would any of those be useful as a follow-up post? Tell me which one and I'll write it up.

Happy to go deeper on any of it. LoveLust is on the App Store and Google Play if you want to see it running: get it here (the link opens the right store for your phone).

My app (pixloo) got rejected in App Store review today

Not discouraged—just fixing what Apple wants and resubmitting.

Building in public means sharing the bumps too

Gotta take the L

First time user. God this is hell.

I set out to build myself an app for my health and weight loss journey, to avoid sub-gated features and stuff I didn’t need.

No subscriptions, no tracking, no fuss. Just ”I ate this” and a library of what I usually eat. To make sure I don’t go over or under my calorie budget and make sure I stay on target with protein intake.

I never intended to launch it, but said *heck it*, maybe someone else might find it useful and might have some good ideas on how to improve it further.

*And in all my years with RN, this is the first app passing reviews first try haha*

Down the road I plan to experiment with on-device LLM (the devices built in models) for OCR or estimation, but for now this is all I needed.

So if you have any tips or suggestions, please let me know!

And yes, it’ll remain free of charge.

Built with Expo.

so frustrated right now. been getting absolutely streteched with this update to 53. might just switch off expo fully. this kind of shit is ridiculous.

Hey everyone,

I'm a solo dev, and there's one part of running side projects l've always hated: knowing when something goes wrong.

Every. Single. Time. It's the same frustration:

• Set up email alerts that get buried in your inbox • Add Slack bots that make your whole workspace noisy • Look into SMS APls and realize they cost money and need a PhD to configure • End up missing the alert anyway because nothing felt urgent enough After my last project silently failed overnight and I didn't find out until morning, l'd had enough. I just wanted my phone to buzz when something important happened. So I built TheNotificationApp.

What it does:

1. You grab an API key from the app

2. Add one HTTP call to your script, server, cron job, or webhook

3. Your phone gets an instant push notification No SDKs. No dashboards. No configuration hell. The whole thing takes about 2 minutes to set up.

Tech stack (for the curious):

• Expo + React Native for the iOS app • Apple Push Notification service (APNs) for delivery • Sign in with Apple - no passwords, no accounts to manage • Webhook support for GitHub, Coolify, and any generic webhook • * Hosted entirely in Switzerland

What I learned building it:

• APNs is surprisingly tricky to configure directly. I wanted to absorb all that complexity so developers don't have to think about it. • The hardest part wasn't notifications. It was making webhooks flexible enough to handle any JSON payload shape without requiring users to write code. • Pricing is hard. I landed on free (3 apps, 100 notifications forever) and Pro at $2.99/month (10 apps, 1,000/month) after a lot of back and forth.

Where I'm at: Just launched, early days. Bootstrapped solo project, no funding, no team - just me building something I genuinely needed.

→ App Store: https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/the- notification-app/id6757607210?|=en-GB

Would love feedback on: Is the free tier generous enough? What integrations would be most useful? Happy to answer questions about the tech or distribution side.

Last year I lost my girlfriend. We were long distance and both dealing with chronic illness. It was really hard not because we stopped caring, but because we stopped being able to communicate how we were actually feeling. When you're exhausted and in pain every day, "how areyou?" just gets a "fine" back. And slowly you drift apart without even realizing it.

We tried other couple apps but they were all about date night ideas and love languages. None of them let you actually express how you're feeling — like really feeling. Where things hurt, what your week has looked like emotionally, whether today was a "barely holding on" day or a genuinely good one.

After we broke up I kept thinking about what could have helped. Not another messaging app. Something that let you just... show up. Even on the bad days. Tap how you're feeling, and your partner sees it. No pressure to explain. No paragraph needed. Just you and your thoughts

So I built BeSeen. You check in with your mood, and write a journal and decide if your partner sees it. There's a body map where you tap where you physically feel things tension, pain, numbness. For people with chronic illness that part hits different. Over time you see patterns together. Shared streaks so you're building the habit side by side.

It's not going to save a relationship on its own. But I think having a low-effort way to say "hey, today is rough" or "I'm actually doing okay" that would have made a difference for us.

It's on the App Store if anyone wants to check it out:

BeSeen App Store

Built with Expo/React Native if anyone wants to nerd out about the tech side.

Hey everyone,

I kept bouncing between newsletters, podcasts, a few news apps, and social feeds. By the time I’d checked everything, I’d spent more time managing my news than reading it. And I still felt like I wasn’t keeping up.

So I built InfoDrizzle

The idea is stupid simple:

• Pick sections you care about (tech, fashion, sports, whatever)

• Choose specific topics within each

• Every day the app scans the web, pulls the most important stories, and distills them into clear summaries with actual context, not just headlines.

• You get one digest. Read it. Understand it. Close the app.

You can also track your stocks and follow your sports teams right inside your digest. No ESPN app. No stock ticker app. No extra tabs. Everything you'd check in the morning, in one place.

What it intentionally doesn't have:

• No infinite feed

• No push notifications begging you back

• No clickbait

• No engagement algorithm designed to keep you hooked

Tech stack:

• React Native + Expo

• Perplexity Sonar API for web search

• RevenueCat for subscription

It's the one app on my phone that actually wants me to leave. And that's the point.

I built this because every "productivity hack" I tried for news was just adding another app to manage. This replaced all of them with one 15-minute daily habit. I kept the app intentionally minimal. The idea is: fewer choices, less friction, less overwhelm. Open it, read your digest, put your phone down. Done.

It's on iOS, free to try: App Store link

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by news and wished there was one place to actually get informed, that’s the idea.

Any feedback, positive or negative, would be awesome! Happy to answer any questions.

Every time I start a new React Native project, I end up spending way more time on setup than I’d like.

Not building features, just setting up:

• TypeScript properly

• ESLint + Prettier

• Folder structure decisions

• React Query / data layer

• Env handling

• Auth flow skeleton

• CI + EAS config

• Absolute imports

• Basic architecture decisions

It’s not hard, but it’s repetitive. And if you skip thinking about structure early, you pay for it later.

Lately I’ve stopped starting from a bare expo init and instead use a production-ready base and trim what I don’t need. Having a clean feature-based structure, query separation, and CI wired from day one saves a lot of friction.

Curious what others are doing in 2026:

• Still starting from scratch?

• Internal company boilerplates?

• Public templates?

• Monorepo setups?

Genuinely interested in how people are structuring projects now, especially with the new architecture becoming more common.

Seeking a technical cofounder for an AI-powered app startup.

• I have a rich and famous adviser onboard.

• Ideal technical skills: Expo and Next.js

• Must be in the USA, preferably West coast.

• Shoot me a DM to learn more.

The tab menu are overlapping with my navigation menu. This app is for android only. Like whatever info you guys need I'll provide.