Module 1 recap

An hour ago you had a laptop and a phone. You now have a project that runs on the phone, updates itself when you save, and answers to plain English.

The order matters. You saw the money first — every charge in the course, both optional, both at the end, and the one nobody else mentions: Claude Code has no free tier, so lessons 1 to 3 were built to need no paid account. Nothing later can surprise you on a bill, because you have already seen the bill.

Then the toolchain, and one decision inside it that will save you an afternoon: no emulator. An 8GB Windows laptop cannot run Android Studio and a virtual phone without swapping to disk, and there is a public report of four hours lost to exactly that. Your phone is the test device, and it is the thing you can hand across a table, which no emulator has ever been.

Then the win. npx create-expo-app@latest, npx expo start, a QR code, an app in your hand — and --tunnel in your pocket for the Windows firewall that stops a good number of people at precisely that step.

And then the part almost nobody knows about yet. create-expo-app wrote AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md and .claude/settings.json for you, because directing an agent to build a mobile app is now the supported workflow rather than an experiment. You added four rules describing your actual machine, started Claude inside the project so it read them, and changed a screen by asking.

Where this goes next

Module 1 was the setup and the win. The rest of the course builds the app and then ships it.

• Module 2 gives it shape. A file in the app folder is a screen; three tabs that work; a form that looks like an app rather than a tutorial. Plus the lesson no competing course has: what to do when the agent itself is the bug.
• Module 3 makes the data survive. Entries still there after a restart, a history you can search and edit, and the airplane-mode test.
• Module 4 is the phone's own hardware. A photographed receipt, an evening reminder, your own icon and name — and Claude screenshotting your running app and tapping on it, which is the answer to "the model cannot see the phone".
• Modules 5 and 6 make it yours and ship it. The chart, dark mode, your currency; then a file anyone can install, the twenty-five dollar door, the twelve testers and fourteen days nobody warns you about, and a real submission.

One habit to carry forward: say what you want and what not to touch, then look at the phone rather than the terminal. Everything else in this course is that loop with bigger requests.