I really don't understand this. Firstly, when you say up to settings.gradle do you mean stop before doing settings.gradle or stop after doing settings.gradle.

after that are you explaining that we have to refactor how we call assets in every file they've been used?

do i need to use expo-file-system?

I've spent a week trying to figure this out and yours is literally the only set of instructions i can find on how to make an asset bundle with expo.