Documenting Expo APIs

Guidelines for writing TSDoc comments in Expo SDK packages. The docs generation system (GenerateDocsAPIData.ts + TypeDoc) extracts these comments to produce API reference documentation.

Document APIs as you write them, not as an afterthought. When implementing new features, write TSDoc comments alongside the code.

When to Use

• Implementing new features that expose public TypeScript APIs
• Adding or modifying public APIs in packages/expo-*
• Documenting functions, types, interfaces, constants, or enums
• Adding platform-specific annotations
• Writing code examples in docblocks

Core Principles

1. Third-person declarative — describe what the function does, not what to do
2. Explain the iceberg — document failure modes, side effects, concurrency behavior, not just params/returns
3. Quality over quantity — no docs is better than useless docs like "The width" for a width property