Phone apps
Can you turn my website into a phone app?
Asked more than anything else, and the answer has three parts. The first needs nobody’s permission.
Part one: it is already installable
From the minute your app exists.
Your app can be added to a home screen right now. On Android it is one tap. On an iPhone it is Share, then Add to Home Screen — Apple has never offered a prompt for this, so the app quietly says so once and never nags again.
What you get is a real icon, an app that opens without an address bar, and its own place in the app switcher. Also on Windows and Mac, where it gets its own window and a Start-menu entry.
No developer account. No store review. No fee. No second version of your app to maintain. For a bakery, a clinic or a tutor, this is most of what "I want an app" actually means.
The icon is drawn from your app’s initial in a colour derived from its name, so it is stable. It is a monogram, not a logo — we do not know what your business looks like, and inventing a mark for you would be a worse lie than a letter.
Part two: a real Android file, from a button
Press Build and you get two files: one anybody can install from a link today, and the bundle Google wants uploaded. About five minutes the first time, eighty seconds after that.
Two things about it that can never be taken back, which is why both are handled carefully. Your app’s identity on the store is fixed forever — change it and you have published a different app with no installs and no reviews. And the key your app is built with is generated once, kept in your own project, and leaves with you when you go.
Getting it listed is our job, not yours. We submit it to the Play Store under our developer account, so there is no console for you to open, no one-off fee to pay Google, no identity check to pass and no fortnight of closed testing with twelve volunteers. You press Build, you tell us it is ready, and we handle the listing, the store questionnaire and the reviewers. The release fee covers exactly that work.
The installable file still matters, and it is free: send it by link, put it on your own phone, give it to your first twenty customers, and find out whether people use it before anything goes near a store.
Part three: the App Store, said plainly
The App Store is the one place we cannot yet take off your hands, and we would rather say so plainly than take money for it. Signing an app so it will install on a real iPhone needs Apple hardware and an Apple membership, and that half of our pipeline is not finished. Today we can produce a build that runs in Apple’s simulator; it will not install on a phone.
Apple also reviews every version, and their rule on minimum functionality exists to reject apps that are only a website in a box — which is why we check for that ourselves, twice, before anything is submitted anywhere.
So for iPhone users today the honest answer is the free home-screen route above, which works on every iPhone and needs nobody’s permission. When signing is built, the App Store becomes our job too, on the same terms as the Play Store.
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