Expo builds vs. Turtle builds
| Expo | Turtle |
|---|---|
| App hosted on Expo servers | Self-hosted |
Calls Expo URL for future OTAs exp://i3-kvb.ccheever.an-example.exp.direct:80 | Calls our server's URL for furture OTAs http://build.myserver.com/android-index.json |
| OTAs will fetch JS bundles and assets from Expo’s CDN | OTAs will fetch JS bundles and assets from your servers |
| Build is put in a build queue, you wait for your turn | No build queue |
| ~ 32 minutes in pipeline | ~ 8 minutes in pipeline |
The entire pipeline including installing JDK, setting up Android SDK, the actual build of the app bundle, and uploading of the artifacts took less than 8 minutes.
# Expo build
expo build:android --release-channel production
# Turtle build
EXPO_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD=${EXPO_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD}
EXPO_ANDROID_KEY_PASSWORD=${EXPO_ANDROID_KEY_PASSWORD}
turtle build:android \
--keystore-path ${EXPO_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PATH} \
--keystore-alias ${EXPO_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_ALIAS} \
--public-url "${PUBLIC_URL}/android-index.json" \
--release-channel "production"
Over The Air (OTA) updates
The Over The Air (OTA) updates work by calling the URL where your app's JS bundle and assets are hosted. With apps built with expo build, it is hosted and handled on Expo servers. For turtle builds, you usually pass a --public-url option specifying the URL the app is supposed to call for updates.
If the --public-url you specified is offline or unreachable, the app could result in a blank white screen. This was the case for my app where i had set updates.checkAutomatically to ON_LOAD which basically means that it would check for updates every time the app was loaded. This combined with no error-handling for this scenario resulted in a blank white screen on app load and 500 errors in Sentry because the URL couldn't be reached
Self-hosting and Publishing
It is possible to publish your app on Expo servers and then build it with Turtle CLI. This saves you from self-publishing the app and maintaining servers.
Instead of providing --public-url, you'd save EXPO_USERNAME and EXPO_PASSWORD as environment variables.
But this flow only works if you have an Expo developer account which is \$29/m
I'm using Netlify to self-host the app. It's an additional step in the build pipeline, but it's free to use once setup (and gives you 800 build minutes per month for automated deploys). I love Netlify!