Expo Tutorial: Build Your First Universal App

Expo's own tutorial builds StickerSmash, a small app that lets you pick a photo, drop stickers on it, and save the result — running on Android, iOS and the web from the same codebase. Expo says it takes up to two hours, and that estimate is roughly honest if you type rather than paste.

What makes it the best starting point in this whole category is that Expo controls the tooling, so the instructions are never out of step with the CLI. Nine chapters, each ending with something visible on screen.

What you build, step by step

• Create the app from the TypeScript template
• A two-screen bottom tabs layout with Expo Router
• Break the layout down with flexbox
• Use the platform's system UI to pick an image
• A sticker picker built from Modal and FlatList
• Touch gestures for moving and scaling stickers
• Screenshot capture and saving to disk with third-party libraries
• Handling the differences between Android, iOS and web
• Status bar, splash screen and app icon

What it quietly skips

There's no backend, no authentication, no data persistence beyond saving an image, and no state management story past component state. The tutorial also lets you copy-paste every snippet, which is convenient and slightly corrosive — it's very easy to reach chapter nine with a working app and no ability to write chapter three again from memory. And the whole thing lives inside Expo's managed workflow, so nothing here prepares you for the day you need a native module that Expo doesn't wrap.

Who it's for

Anyone who knows some JavaScript and React and wants a real app on their phone this afternoon. It's the single best two hours in free React Native material. Skip it if you're brand new to programming — Expo now points those readers at a separate Build with AI tutorial instead, and that's the right call. Skip it also if you're evaluating bare React Native, since the Expo Router and managed-workflow assumptions run through every chapter.

Our take

Current, tested, and pleasant to follow, which is rarer than it should be. The weakness is scope rather than quality: you end up with a toy that runs everywhere and a false sense of how much of a real app you can now build. Treat it as chapter one, then go straight into a project that needs data from a server — that's where the actual learning starts and where this tutorial deliberately stops.