In my last post I wrote how deploy Expo Dev Client apps to devices via TestFlight. This works great for testing on iOS devices, but it’s quite lacking on macOS. You can use it, alright, but there is no easy way to open the expo dev menu and therefore no easy way to reload the app and no easy way to attach the debugger.

dev-client-mac-tools is here to fix that.

What is dev-client-mac-tools?

Since Apple transitioned to Apple Silicon iPhone and iPad apps can be installed on macOS unless the publisher explicitly disables it. This also works for TestFlight builds. This also works for Expo Dev Client apps and with my testflight-dev-deploy you can easily deploy them to all your developers Apple devices.

But iOS apps on macOS are very bare bones. So dev-client-mac-tools is here to create an amazing macOS developer experience for Expo Dev Client app.

amongst other things it adds these features:

• shortcut to reload the app
• shortcut open the Expo dev menu
• shortcut to toggle between dark and light mode
• resize between various iPhone sizes to verify layouts
• make the app float on top of VSCode so you can easily see your app while coding

You can even extend the dev menu with your own custom commands during development.

Installation

The installation is very straight forward. You can find the simple command in the repo