Locofy does export React Native, and its documentation stops at the download.
React Native is a real option in Locofy. You choose it when you create the project, there is a documentation page called Exporting React Native code, and a second page covers using Expo. So the answer to the usual question is yes. The second question is the one that costs people a weekend. Locofy's documentation index lists 109 pages. We read all 109 on 22 October 2026. Not one of them tells you how to run the code you just downloaded. No install step, no start command, no mention of Xcode or Android Studio anywhere in the set. If you have never built a mobile app before, the wider version of this problem is covered in build mobile app without coding.
What follows is what Locofy says it produces, which design tool the React Native path really starts from, the exact size of the gap between a ZIP file and an app on a phone, and who fills it. Every claim about Locofy comes from Locofy's own pages. Every claim about running React Native comes from Expo's.
Start hereThe short version
The export is documented. The run is not.
Locofy is a design to code tool. It reads a Figma frame, works out the layout, tags the elements, and writes screens in the framework you picked. For a mobile project that framework can be React Native, and the output is yours as a ZIP, a GitHub push, a CLI pull or a VS Code fetch. All of that is documented in detail, down to the checkout screen that counts your lines of code before you confirm.
Then the pages end. A React Native project is a JavaScript project with two native folders behind it, and those folders have to be generated and compiled before anybody holds the app. Locofy writes the screens. It does not write that step, and it does not describe it. Knowing that in advance is the difference between a quiet afternoon and a bad one.
Does Locofy actually export React Native code?
Yes, and the choice is made early. When you create a project in the Locofy plugin you select a framework from a documented list. The web options are React, Next.js, HTML and CSS, Gatsby, Vue and Angular. The mobile options are Flutter, React Native, Swift and Jetpack Compose. Next you pick a UI library, and the Quickstart names React Native Kitten for mobile projects. The older design system pages go further and list React Native Paper, React Native UI Kitten and React Native Elements as the supported React Native libraries.
From there the flow is the same as the web flow. You select a frame, up to five designs at a time, and press Convert to Code. Locofy calls this the Lightning flow, and documents what happens inside it: it reads the layout, applies responsiveness rules, tags buttons and inputs and images, detects reusable components, and checks for missing custom fonts so it can prompt you to upload the font files from your computer. On later runs it regenerates only what changed in Figma. You get a live preview in the plugin before anything leaves.
The React Native page sums up its own promise in one line: export your code in React Native, build your code to generate both iOS and Android packages. Read that sentence twice. Locofy exports. You build. The verbs are split on purpose, and every page after that one keeps the split. There is no Locofy page about building, because building is not something Locofy does.
Locofy Docs, Exporting React Native code, read 22 October 2026
Pick your route
Where the documentation stops
Locofy documents five ways to get code out. Pick the one you plan to use. The left column is what its own pages describe, read on 22 October 2026. The right column is the part nobody hands you.
ZIP download
What Locofy documents: Three shapes: one specific component, a set of individual components, or screens and components as a project package. For screens you pick a starting screen that acts as the start page for your app. A checkout screen shows how many screens, components, files and lines of code are about to leave.
What is still yours: Opening it. The documentation ends at the Confirm Code Export button. No page in the set tells you what to install or what to type to see the screens run.
The left column is quoted from Locofy. The right column is the gap, and the gap is the same size whichever route you take.
Which design tool does the React Native path start from?
Figma. The documentation landing page says you install the Locofy plugin inside Figma or Penpot, so Penpot is a real answer on paper. In practice it is thin. Beyond that one line on the landing page, the word Penpot appears exactly once across the 109 pages Locofy's documentation index lists, in a single aside on the Import from URL quickstart, and never in an instruction about mobile or React Native. Every numbered step in the plugin Quickstart says Figma. The CLI takes a Figma URL. The MCP server takes a Figma URL. Import from URL takes a Figma frame URL. If your design lives anywhere else, the honest answer is that nothing in the documentation covers you.
There is a loose end worth naming, because it will confuse you if you meet it cold. The Exporting React Native code page carries two tabs above its videos, labelled Figma and Adobe XD, and the VS Code extension page still tells you to use the plugin in Figma or Adobe XD. No current workflow page mentions Adobe XD at all. These are older pages that nobody has swept, and a tab label is not a supported path. Treat the Figma tab as the live one and check with Locofy before you plan anything around the other.
The Figma dependency shapes what comes out, which earns one more paragraph. Locofy's own Troubleshooting page says that by default it converts designs to pixel-perfect frontend code without applying any styling or layout changes. Your design is the specification, including its mistakes. The same page has an entry for React Native code looking different on different devices, and the cause it gives is absolute positioning, with the fix being Figma auto layout rather than anything in the generated code. A tool with the same shape and a different starting canvas runs into the same wall, which is why uizard to mobile app reaches a similar place from a different direction.
Locofy Docs, Exporting React Native code, with its Figma and Adobe XD tabs, read 22 October 2026
What does the exported code still need before it runs?
Locofy does not say. That is not a gap in our reading. Its documentation index at locofy.ai/docs/llms.txt lists 109 pages, and on 22 October 2026 we fetched and searched every one. The set contains no npx expo start, no pod install, no node_modules, no package.json, no Xcode and no Android Studio. The phrase npm install appears on seven pages. Six of them install a Locofy tool, the CLI on five and the Storybook addon on one. The seventh is a tip on a page of Agent Mode prompts, reminding you to have Bootstrap installed, which is a web library and no use to a React Native export. The only instruction anywhere about a dependency in your own exported project sits on the Troubleshooting page, under a question from someone who already ran the project and found a csstype package missing. The answer tells pnpm users to run pnpm add csstype by hand.
So here is the missing chapter, from the documentation of the thing Locofy hands you to. A React Native project built with Expo needs the development client added first, with npx expo install expo-dev-client. Then npx expo run:android or npx expo run:ios generates the native android and ios folders if they do not exist, compiles the app, installs it and starts the development server. After that, a change to your TypeScript or JavaScript needs only npx expo start. You regenerate the native folders when you install or update a library that contains native code, when you change the app config, or when you upgrade the Expo SDK.
Compiling on your own machine means a native toolchain: Android Studio with the emulator for Android, Xcode with the simulator for iOS. Expo offers EAS Build as the alternative, where the compile happens on its servers, which also lets you make an iOS build from a machine that is not a Mac. One detail cuts the other way and is easy to miss: Expo says building locally is the only way to install a development build on an iPhone without a paid Apple Developer account. Expo's page carried a modification date of 10 September 2026 when we read it on 22 October 2026.
One more thing about Expo in a Locofy project, since Locofy raises it. Locofy documents Export to Snack as a way to run your app without setting up a development environment, and it works, with an Expo Snack token. Expo is clear about what that class of thing is for. Its own guidance is that a development build is your own version of Expo Go, and that a development build is what it recommends when you want to create your own app and release it to app stores. A Snack demos a screen. It does not ship one.
Expo, Introduction to development builds, modified 10 September 2026, read 22 October 2026
The whole path, and who documents each step
Read this as a division of labour rather than a scoreboard. Locofy never promised to build your app, and the column it fills is real work that would otherwise be yours. The point of laying it out is that the second column is also real work, and it arrives without warning the first time you double click a downloaded folder.
| The step | In Locofy's documentation | In Expo's documentation |
|---|---|---|
| Choose React Native as the project framework | Yes | Not covered |
| Choose Expo as the project environment | Yes | Not covered |
| Get the screens out as code | ZIP, clipboard, GitHub push, CLI pull or VS Code | Not covered |
| Add the development client to the project | Not covered | npx expo install expo-dev-client |
| Compile a native app you can install | Not covered | npx expo run:android or npx expo run:ios |
| Start the development server | Only as an Expo Snack, with a Snack token | npx expo start |
| Install a native toolchain to build on your own machine | Not covered | Android Studio for Android, Xcode for iOS |
| Build in the cloud instead of locally | Not covered | EAS Build, which can make iOS builds from a non-macOS machine |
So who fills the gap, and should you keep Locofy?
Keep it if your designer lives in Figma and your team already has people who run npx expo run:ios without looking it up. Locofy is good at the thing it claims: turning a careful Figma file into screens that look like the file. Handing those screens to a developer who owns the native side is the workflow its documentation describes, and it is a reasonable one.
The trouble starts when nobody on the project owns the native side. Then the ZIP sits in a downloads folder and the Figma file goes stale, and the GitHub route does not rescue you either, because the push only goes one way. Locofy's Troubleshooting page says plainly that the Builder does not sync your GitHub code back and shows only what it generated from your designs. The first time a developer edits a screen in the repository, your two sources of truth part company and the Builder is the one that stays wrong.
Newly is built for the other half of that problem. You describe the app in plain English and it writes a real React Native and Expo project you own, with GitHub sync that runs in both directions, so an edit made in the repository is not a fork. It uploads iOS builds to TestFlight, publishes to Google Play internal testing and builds a standalone Android APK, which means the compile step above happens without you installing Xcode. It is $25 a month, with no free tier. What it will not do is press submit on the App Store for you: Apple requires the content owner to submit, which is the rule in section 4.2.6 of the review guidelines about apps from a template or an app generation service. The mechanics of your side of that are in publish to app store.
The two tools are not really rivals, which is the last useful thing to say. A Figma file that has been through auto layout properly is a better brief than a paragraph of description, whatever you build with. If your design is already clean, keep converting it and hire the native skill. If the design is a sketch and the app is the point, describe the app and skip the handoff. The same question from the visual builder side, where the output is a web app rather than screens, is in plasmic to mobile app.
Questions people ask about Locofy and mobile apps
Yes. React Native is one of the frameworks you pick when you create a Locofy project. The plugin Quickstart lists the choices as React, Next.js, HTML and CSS, Gatsby, Vue and Angular for web, and Flutter, React Native, Swift and Jetpack Compose for mobile. There is a documentation page called Exporting React Native code, whose own summary line reads: export your code in React Native, build your code to generate both iOS and Android packages. A separate page covers using Expo for React Native projects. Read on 22 October 2026.
Keep the Figma file. Skip the handoff.
Write down your screens, what each one does, and the one thing the app has to do that a web page cannot. That list is the brief, and it gets you a project that compiles and uploads without a native toolchain on your desk.
Start building