17 karma · joined July 5, 2015
There's lots of reasons someone might want to start with Expo while developing an app. If their team doesn't have native experience, it's far more accessible than needing to maintain a native stack (or two should they support Android).
It also supports the ability for OTAs out of the box, which allows them to be responsive to feedback / bugs / feature requests.
There's more to RN/Expo than "do you plan on releasing a cross-platform product at once". Even if their road map is "Apple now, Android later" the decision would still be justified.
The exemplar projects in the Australian system were discontinued after the second round, and were really just lip-service -- at the end of the day, even the exemplar projects were at the mercy of internal Departmental IT operations who ultimately decided what went on to their Departmental domains.
Frustratingly the idea will be dead for a good time to come now. For an agency to do this, they need a stick -- I believe the GDS had IT spending levers they could pull to control how money was spent across the entire public sector. This made them quite powerful and ultimately allowed them to say "if you want to publish your agency's content, it has to be on our platform".
The end result is a far better UX.