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Expo vs Material UI: What are the differences?
Introduction
Expo and Material UI are two widely used frameworks in web and mobile application development. While Expo focuses on simplifying the process of building and deploying mobile apps, Material UI provides a set of pre-designed UI components to create visually appealing and consistent user interfaces. Let's dive into the key differences between the two:
Platform Dependency: Expo is primarily designed for developing cross-platform mobile applications, enabling developers to write code once and deploy it to both Android and iOS platforms. On the other hand, Material UI is a UI library built specifically for web application development, offering a wide range of customizable components for building responsive web interfaces.
Developer Experience: Expo aims to provide a smoother development experience by offering a set of readily available tools and services, such as a local development environment and cloud-based build and deployment systems. Material UI, on the other hand, focuses on enhancing the developer experience by providing a comprehensive set of UI components and styles that can be easily integrated into existing web projects.
Customizability: Expo offers a limited degree of customization compared to Material UI. While Expo provides a set of default styling and layout options, it may be challenging to make extensive modifications to the design and user interface. Material UI, on the other hand, provides a highly customizable set of components, allowing developers to tweak and adapt the UI to match their specific requirements.
Community and Ecosystem: Expo has its own dedicated community and ecosystem, with a wide range of community-contributed packages and resources available to help developers. Material UI, being part of the larger React ecosystem, benefits from the extensive support and resources provided by the React community. Additionally, Material UI has a strong community of its own, providing additional resources and support specific to the library.
Documentation and Learning Curve: Expo offers intuitive and extensive documentation, making it easier for new developers to get started with the framework. The learning curve for Expo is relatively straightforward, especially for those familiar with JavaScript and React. Material UI also provides comprehensive documentation, but due to its more extensive set of features and customization options, it may have a slightly steeper learning curve, particularly for beginners.
Integration with Existing Projects: Material UI is designed to seamlessly integrate with existing React projects, allowing developers to easily incorporate the library into their web applications. Expo, however, has its own specific project structure and dependencies, making it less straightforward to integrate into existing projects. This difference in integration can significantly impact the choice of framework depending on the project requirements.
In summary, Expo is a framework primarily focused on simplified cross-platform mobile app development, while Material UI is a comprehensive UI library tailored for building responsive web interfaces. Expo offers a smoother development experience, while Material UI provides more customizability and integration options, with each framework having its own dedicated community and documentation resources.
Hello guys, I am new here. So, if I posted without specific guidelines, please ignore.
Basically, I am an iOS developer and developing native apps for the last three years. Recently, I started learning React Native to develop apps for both platforms. If anyone out there knows any useful resources that will become a better react native developer.
#newbie
Well, the first resource I would recommend you is my upcoming book by Packt Publishing, "Professional React Native", but it's due late January next year :) . Now jokes aside (the book's real by the way :) ), the easiest way to build a iOS/Android/Web app with React Native is to do: npm install -g expo-cli expo init some-project cd some-project expo eject
You might have heard of Expo, but trust me, stay away from it. Expo highest value is that it's an already pre-configured 3 platforms environment, but if you don't eject then you're vendor-locked to what Expo has to offer in iOS and Android, which is very poor compared to going full React Native on these platforms, they can't even handle Google Sign In properly and by the way, even if your app is 10 lines of code your app size will be over 40 MB if you don't eject, yep it's that bad, plus the performance is regular and the loading times slow, not to mention that you're stuck with their build service which the free tier makes you wait for hours for a free build slot. It's important to note that when ejecting you don't lose the Web, you simply do expo start --web to start your dev environment and expo build:web to build a static website that you can serve with any web server. Regarding state management, don't bother with "lifting state up" philosophies mixed with Context API to manage your state, lifting state is a great pattern and helps your codebase, Context is great to avoid prop-drilling, but NEVER mix them to achieve app-wide state management, for that, simply go for Redux or MobX, the hype is all about Redux, but I consider MobX far better in many aspects. However, as you're getting new into this I would recommend you start with Redux AND PLEASE grab yourself npm install @manaflair/redux-batch so that you can batch updates and don't bring your app to a crawl. Forget that "connect HOC" thing with React-Redux, don't bother for a second with it, go with Hooks and useSelector and useDispatch and the likes, it will make your code SO much cleaner and smaller. Adopt clean and new Hooks philosophy, avoid writing class components as much as possible and write function components augmented with Hooks.
Fonts and typography are fun. Material Design is a framework (developed by Google) that basically geeks out on how to assemble your typographical elements together into a design language. If you're into fonts and typography, it's fantastic. It provides a theming engine, reusable components, and can pull different user interfaces together under a common design paradigm. I'd highly recommend looking into Borries Schwesinger's book "The Form Book" if you're going to be working with Material UI or are otherwise new to component design.
https://www.amazon.com/Form-Book-Creating-Printed-Online/dp/0500515085
Pros of Expo
- Free15
- Hot Reload13
- Easy to learn9
- Common ios and android app setup9
- Open Source6
- Streamlined6
- Builds into a React Native app5
- PWA supported2
- Plugins for web use with Next.js1
Pros of Material-UI
- React141
- Material Design82
- Ui components60
- CSS framework30
- Component25
- Looks great14
- Responsive12
- Good documentation12
- LESS9
- Ui component8
- Open source7
- Code examples6
- Flexible6
- JSS5
- Angular3
- Very accessible3
- Fun3
- Supports old browsers out of the box3
- Typescript support2
- # of components2
- Interface2
- Designed for Server Side Rendering2
- Support for multiple styling systems1
- Css1
- Easy to work with1
- Accessibility1
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Cons of Expo
Cons of Material-UI
- Hard to learn. Bad documentation35
- Hard to customize28
- Hard to understand Docs21
- Bad performance8
- Extra library needed for date/time pickers7
- For editable table component need to use material-table7
- Typescript Support2
- # of components1
