I’m very new at attempting to create an App in general, and unsure if I am in over my head or not. In general, I’m looking to possibly create a Golf League App for our small summer time league. A combination of perhaps making our league function better and myself looking to learn more.
I have past basic skills with some php, mysql, java, css, html, etc having hosted a website or 2 in the past. But I am pretty new with React and Expo and creating an app.
So given some time, patience, lots of reading and learning, etc. In your honest opinion, do you think this is something a newbie can learn?
And a few quick questions in trying to understand the overall mechanics in learning to create an app vs past static html type sites.
I assume (always a bad thing) that eventually with an app, that you would update your ‘backend’ website or host for updates and the app would read those updates. Ie, when posting golf scores, etc. I would most likely be posting updates on a backend with the App possibly a read only type thing.
Or perhaps to have users post scores from their phones directly in the app and update to the host site. I guess that’s a design type feature to think about?
Can Expo possibly access GPS info if one wanted to try and create their own golf app with distances from Tee to Green, etc?
And as I start reading the docs, is there a PDF version available to print to hardcopy?
I absolutely think you could build your Golf League app with Expo. There are many folks in the community now that have had little background or experience that have gone on to create their ideas.
I would take time to thoroughly iterate out what you want the app to do and how you want it to achieve said functionality before getting into it, but once you have the foundation laid out I think you’ll find that you can start building rather quickly. Snack (snack.expo.io ) is a great tool to quickly iterate ideas especially with regards to UI. We do have a location API that you could use to access a device’s GPS and do some geocoding.
I would recommend joining our Expo Developers Slack if you haven’t already and you are already on here so you’ve got the two platforms to receive support covered. Just remember to make sure you do your own due diligence and research things before asking questions as people really appreciate knowing that you’ve spent some of your own time instead of just asking others to do the work for you!
Feel free to ask any questions! We prioritize support on the forums but Slack can be useful for quick, rapid fire responses. Either way, we’re here to help and we’ve got some amazing community members who you’ll likely get to know as you build out your app.
*I’ll have to look into if we have a way to get a PDF file of our docs for you to print off