Building a web-based application is often the most affordable and accessible way to reach an audience. Anyone with a device that supports a web browser can use your app online. So, why even bother with native app development?
Mobile operating systems like Android and iOS account for about 60% of all online computing devices worldwide [add reference]. This means that most people interacting with your software will likely do so through a smartphone or tablet. When you think of a seamless mobile experience that keeps users coming back, native apps are often what come to mind. Whether it’s productivity apps like TimePager and EverNote, e-commerce platforms like DoorDash and Uber, or social media giants like Instagram and TikTok—native apps make the most of mobile device capabilities.
While native apps offer the best experience for handheld users, they can be costly and technically challenging to build, especially for both Android and iOS. That’s where Apptile comes in. Our mission is to democratise access to powerful, fully native mobile apps, allowing anyone to build and publish them, just as platforms like WordPress, Wix, and Webflow have done for websites.
At Apptile, we’re committed to lowering the cost of development and reducing the barriers to entry for native app creation. To better serve our users, we categorize them into four groups:
Many no-code solutions are designed for Beginners, but they often limit users as they advance. With solutions of this kind, once your product grows, you might find yourself redoing everything to build a native app from scratch.
Apptile is designed to support your growth from a simple no-code solution to an inhouse development team. You can start small and scale up as your needs evolve, ultimately enabling your development team to maintain a fully customisable native app.
To support this journey, we offer three main tools: DesignStudio, TileStudio, and ApptileSDK.
DesignStudio is perfect for Beginners who want to create an e-commerce app. Such a user will come into the no-code app builder space typically looking for the following features:
DesignStudio comes with ready-to-go themes that make this process easy. Simply connect your store apis to a theme and your app can go live with minimal effort. We also offer a wide range of Shopify-specific integrations that can be added with just a click. Our platform is designed with modularity in mind so we can usually add new integrations within two weeks.
For Beginners who want to personalise their apps, DesignStudio allows you to customise themes by swapping out tiles, changing colours or images and more. If you can create an HTML-based emailer, you can manage your app with DesignStudio.
The tiles used in DesignStudio are built in TileStudio, our low-code editor. Essentially, TileStudio allows more advanced users to create the building blocks that Beginners use in DesignStudio. A tile is a collection of plugins, which are self-contained widgets that can communicate with servers, handle user input, and render UI elements.
This editor is focussed at the Intermediate category of our users:
This division of labour makes app development faster and more cost-efficient. In our app delivery lifecycle we design apps in figma and once finalised the same person who designed it can usually create the skeleton app (i.e. ui that is maybe not functional yet), in the editor. Meaning someone who can work with figma can do the Intermediate I work. Then a fresher programmer is able to write the bindings to make the app respond to user clicks and communicate with servers. In case a theme is being used this step might not even be required because our themes also encapsulate the javascript that is required for that theme and its variants.
For those ready to take full control of their app, the Apptile SDK is the next step. This allows you to go beyond the plugins and themes provided by our studios, enabling your developers to build custom React Native components and modules.
The Apptile SDK lets you integrate our engine as a library within your React Native app. You can choose to manage some screens with our engine while developing others independently in react native. This way, you can transition gradually, without needing to rewrite your entire app from scratch. Even when you do have an inhouse development team you may want to continue controlling some screens within your app using our platform because of the infrastructure we provide for easily pushing updates using a browser. Additionally your developers might choose to extend our platform so that you can do updates specific to your app using the studios, thus reducing the burden on your developers in the long run.
Our preview app is a great example of this hybrid approach—some screens are custom-built, but when you start previewing an app, control passes to our engine.
There are other tools out there, like Flutterflow, which allow you to build native apps using a nocode editor. However, Flutter relies on a custom rendering engine and uses Dart, a language that can be challenging to hire for. Additionally, Apptile’s custom JavaScript transpiler offers features that Flutterflow can’t match. Meaning while FlutterFlow can do more than our DesignStudio, it lacks an intermediate step i.e. the TileStudio where you can do some programming while not having to understand everything about mobile app development.
Expo, combined with React Native, is another option for fast native app iteration, but it doesn’t address content management needs as effectively as Apptile. Even simple changes in a large React Native project can take a week due to development, QA, and release cycles. With Apptile, you can make significant updates, like adding new screens or altering existing ones, in less than a day—all without a developer being involved.
Other cross-platform tools like Xamarin, Capacitor, and Ionic target developers who already have experience with programming in another domain like C#, or webdev or angular, but they’re not trying to do what we are—making native app development accessible to everyone.
