Expo vs Dust
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.
Dust is widening the agent-platform surface: multimodal tools, enterprise audit, model breadth.
Dust is shipping at a fast clip on three fronts that together define a serious agent platform: model breadth (Gemini 3.5 Flash, Grok 4.3, refreshed Anthropic lineup), agent capability (MCP tools can now return images the agent can actually see, plus context compaction for long runs), and enterprise readiness (workspace audit logs streamable to Datadog, Splunk, or any HTTPS sink). Integrations are getting versioned upgrades on the side (Asana MCP v2, Gmail labels and archive). The product is moving from 'chat with an agent' toward 'run agents in production with observability and multimodal I/O.'
Two clear directions: deeper enterprise GTM via SIEM-grade audit, and a more capable agent runtime that can see, remember, and act inside third-party SaaS. The MCP-image release in particular treats Model Context Protocol as a real I/O surface rather than a text-only RPC, which is where the broader MCP ecosystem is heading. Frequent model rotations suggest Dust is positioning as model-agnostic infrastructure rather than locking into one provider.
Next moves likely lean into the same arc: more MCP integrations with action verbs (write/delete/transition states), expanded multimodal returns (audio, structured documents), and finer-grained admin controls layered on top of the audit foundation - tool-usage policies, per-agent egress rules, or approval workflows.
See more alternatives to Expo →
See more alternatives to Dust →