use create-react-native-app without expo-cli

Official documentation indicates different steps: https://github.com/react-community/create-react-native-app#create-react-native-app

if you don't want to use Expo, just follow the eject steps: https://github.com/react-community/create-react-native-app/blob/master/EJECTING.md. Optionally you can reate

or you can create a react native app by yourself without using the create-react-native-app script. More details here, https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started.html#creating-a-new-application

You can use:

react-native init projectName