iPhone
iPhone and iPad
Two routes, and the free one is the one most businesses should take.
The route that works today
Open your app in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. You get an icon, a full-screen app with no address bar, and an entry in the app switcher. No account, no fee, no review, no wait.
We do the fiddly part for you. An installed iPhone app is given the whole screen, and the price of the whole screen is that the top strip sits under the clock and the bottom strip under the bar you swipe to go home. A menu fixed to the bottom lands underneath it and cannot be pressed at all. Your app reserves those edges properly, and the iPhone preview in the builder fills them in so you can see the problem before a customer does.
The App Store route, and what it really asks
An Apple Developer membership, in your name
It costs money every year, and if a business check is involved it takes weeks rather than days. We do not hold it for you: the arrangement is that you own the account and invite us onto your team, so you can revoke us and we never hold your private key.
Apple reviews every version
Not just the first one. Plan for it.
Their rule on minimum functionality
Apple rejects apps that are only a website in a box, and being straight with you: that is what a wrapped app is. Google is relaxed about it and these pass there routinely. Apple is not.
So before a first submission we check the app ourselves, twice and deliberately differently: mechanically, for whether it uses anything a phone can do that a browser cannot, and by actually reading it and asking whether a customer would lose anything by using the website instead. The second check exists because the first one cannot tell a real capability from a token one, and a token one is exactly what gets rejected.
Today the build we can produce is unsigned and runs only in Apple’s simulator. It will not install on a physical iPhone. That is this stage’s honest limit and it is stated in the response every time.
Start with a sentence about your business
Signing up takes a minute and the builder opens at once. You begin with 300 free sparks.
Sign up free Take the free founder test
Signing up is free and takes a minute — an email, a code to prove it is yours, and the builder is open. The founder test is optional, also free, and tells you what you are getting before you commit to anything.