Expo vs Depot
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Extending from build-and-ship into runtime observability and CI primitives.
Expo is in active release mode — SDK 55 landed in February, SDK 56 beta is now out, and the team is filling the gaps with build-time wins (Gradle and compiler caches), new product surfaces (Expo Observe in private preview), and developer-ergo additions like GitHub sign-in. A separate thread on Expo Go's App Store posture keeps recurring, signaling continued platform-store friction.
The arc is broadening past "build and ship React Native apps" into the operational layer around them: production observability with Expo Observe, CI primitives via MCP tools and compiler caches, and authentication ergonomics. The SDK cadence remains the metronome, but the most interesting motion is happening adjacent to it — at the dev-experience and runtime-ops edges.
Expo Observe is the directional bet for 2026; expect it to exit preview tying crash, performance, and user-flow analytics directly to the EAS pipeline. On the iOS side, expect ongoing posts and a push toward Dev Client and bare workflows as the more durable distribution path, with Expo Go reserved for prototyping rather than production handoff.
Depot is rounding out Depot CI into a credible GitHub Actions alternative, and just shipped nested virtualization.
Eight of the last ten changelog entries are Depot CI updates: a new workflow summary page, environment-aware secret and variable variants, CLI commands for metrics, JSON status output, live log streaming, workflow listing and inspection, run cancel/rerun/retry/dispatch, and a DEPOT_JOB_URL env var in every job. Registry got pull-through cache improvements with provider presets. The dominant theme is filling in the feature surface a serious CI platform needs.
Depot is methodically closing the gap between its CI product and the incumbents. The recent run reads like a checklist: workflow UX, secrets, metrics, log streaming, scriptable CLI surface — the table-stakes ergonomics teams expect before migrating off GitHub Actions or CircleCI. The May 20 nested virtualization release expands what kinds of workloads Depot CI can host at all, not just how nicely it hosts them, which is a different and more aggressive move.
Expect more workload-expansion moves following the nested virtualization release — likely Android-specific tooling, deeper matrix/sharding UX (the workflow page already groups matrix failures), and continued CLI parity work. The secrets-and-variables variant model looks set up to grow into broader policy-as-code for CI configuration.
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