My startup is considering customer support tools (eg Intercom) to add to our expo app. We see that Intercom has marginal expo support via GitHub - cmaycumber/config-plugin-react-native-intercom: Expo plugin for adding @intercom/react-native-intercom using expo config plugins. We’d love first class support though.
Additionally, I googled help scout, zendesk, freshdesk, and drift, none of which have first class expo support.
What are others using in their apps for customer support chat or messaging?
Thanks!
hi there!
i think it would be great for someone to submit a pr to intercom to add a config plugin to intercom-react-native. this can be done for other libraries as well. would that fit your criteria for first class support?
config plugins to allow usage of arbitrary native libraries that require additional native config (beyond autolinking) are a very new concept and adoption is only just getting started. you can write them on your own, use one built by another developer in the community, or in some cases already use config plugins included in the libraries themselves. alternatively, if you are comfortable managing your ios and android projects you can still use all expo tools and services (except expo go, you can use development builds instead) in a ‘bare’ app where you managed the native code.
Hey @notbrent thank you for your reply.
For example amplitude analytics in my mind has first class expo support (https://docs.expo.dev/versions/latest/sdk/amplitude/).
I’m hoping to find what other teams are using for customer support tools in the their expo apps that integrates seamlessly with expo and therefore expo is treated as a first-class platform. Or customer support tools that support and release official config plugins. The community one for Intercom isn’t well supported and has issues with newer versions of the official intercom-react-native library.
we are moving away from providing expo versions of these libraries and instead moving towards the model i explained above. we’ll be deprecating the expo-analytics-amplitude library soon and recommending @amplitude/react-native instead
for intercom i believe a good approach would be to open a pull request to add it to their library, so that their team is able to maintain support. if you want to reach out to them and request support you can connect them with brent@expo.dev and bacon@expo.dev and we’ll help them out.