How to Run Separate Beta and Production Expo Builds Locally Without EAS

A developer guide explains how to maintain fully separate beta and production Expo app builds on a local machine without relying on Expo's EAS build service. The approach uses Expo's Continuous Native Generation feature, where the android and ios folders are treated as generated output rather than manually edited source files. By renaming app.json to a dynamic app.config.ts and toggling an APP_VARIANT environment variable, developers can generate distinct native projects with different bundle identifiers for each environment. The setup defaults to the beta variant so that any accidental omission of the variable produces a harmless beta build rather than a production one. The method is compatible with Expo SDK 50 and later, and a working reference project is publicly available on GitHub.