Official Expo support through custom plugins and modules

Requests
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As a mobile developer working with React Native and Expo in a managed workflow, I am considering using the Bitmovin player in my project.

There is existing documentation regarding using the React Native SDK projects or with native Android and iOS code. But when working on an Expo managed project, we have limited access to platform-specific files, such as the configuration files we need to modify to set up the dependencies.

It is possible to create config plugins to make the necessary changes and eventually get the player to work with Expo, but it is up to the developer to do the research to create and maintain the plugin in order to make Bitmovin compatible with their project without altering their workflow.

I believe supporting Expo with official modules and config plugins would be in line with the efforts already made towards simplifying the developer experience, and I would like to know if there were any plans for it.

Thanks in advance, please let me know if I should rather bring this up in the bitmovin-player-react-native repository’s issues instead. I am fairly new to this but I’d be happy to help.

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Hi @luckner

Welcome and thanks for contributing to our community!

Great to hear your interest in using Bitmovin on React Native, and thanks for your suggestion regarding our RN bridge.

I understand how the developer experience would be improved by adding Expo support, and while it isn’t something currently on our roadmap, we’ll be monitoring further interest on this post as well as other channels and we’ll let you know here when there is any movement.

However, as it’s an open-source project, we do welcome and encourage contributions to bitmovin-player-react-native if you would be interested to help move this forward.

Thanks
Jacob

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Hello Jacob,

Thank you for your reply. I did try something but it’s probably not very robust, and it currently works on Android only. I’d like to contribute when I have something that works on iOS and is also cleaner.

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