Originally published on expo.dev/blog

By Erencan Arica

A few years ago, launching a React Native app meant weeks of setup configuring Xcode, managing signing certificates, wrestling with Android Gradle configs, and cobbling together a CI/CD pipeline from scratch. Today, with Expo, a solo developer can go from idea to a production-ready native app in a single afternoon. It's a dream. And that's before we even mention LLMs.

But speed creates a new problem: when shipping is fast, the bottleneck shifts. It's no longer building the app, it's getting it found .

That's where App Store Optimization comes in.

Why shipping fast made App Store discovery harder

Here's the tension: Expo makes is easier for everyone to ship an app and now the App Store has over 2 million apps competing for attention.…