Building Expo apps locally is not going to be removed. I am one of the cofounders of Expo.
Being able to build your app on your own hardware is a relatively fundamental feature of any application software framework. The Expo framework is free and open source and we consciously keep it decoupled from Expo Application Services (EAS), which is a suite of hosted services we manage.
Two of the ways to build your app are:
- Entirely locally, without EAS: generate your native Android and iOS projects with "npx expo prebuild:{android,ios}" and build your app with Android Studio/Gradle and Xcode/xcodebuild, respectively.
- With EAS: after getting set up with EAS, installing EAS CLI, and configuring eas.json, run "eas build". There is also a "--local" flag that runs the compilation steps locally and uses your signing credentials managed by EAS.
Many developers use a mix. For instance, they'll build locally when working on a feature for a fast feedback loop. And they'll use EAS to build their release candidates and PR previews to share with their team.
Being able to build your app on your own hardware is a relatively fundamental feature of any application software framework. The Expo framework is free and open source and we consciously keep it decoupled from Expo Application Services (EAS), which is a suite of hosted services we manage.
Two of the ways to build your app are: - Entirely locally, without EAS: generate your native Android and iOS projects with "npx expo prebuild:{android,ios}" and build your app with Android Studio/Gradle and Xcode/xcodebuild, respectively. - With EAS: after getting set up with EAS, installing EAS CLI, and configuring eas.json, run "eas build". There is also a "--local" flag that runs the compilation steps locally and uses your signing credentials managed by EAS.
Many developers use a mix. For instance, they'll build locally when working on a feature for a fast feedback loop. And they'll use EAS to build their release candidates and PR previews to share with their team.