Expo won’t connect to my physical device

I often work on my side projects from public libraries or in the past, We Work offices, and I very quickly found that while developing my React Native apps (in Expo) and trying to testing them on physical devices, Expo wouldn’t find the device on the the network.

You can fix this by adding --tunnel to the end of your start command.
Here’s a snippet from my package.json file scripts

"start": "expo start --tunnel",

You may also need to install @expo/ngrok if it’s not already installed by default.

npm i -g @expo/ngrok

Sidenote

I actually add a new scripts to my package.json instead, so I can run it normally when I am at home, or use the tunnel when I need to. That might help when your internet connection is slow.

"start-physical": "expo start --tunnel",

If you’re not using package.json scripts, then just run expo start --tunnel directly.

That’s it!

You can find more info in the expo docs here.