Get yourself a Free Android App!
Hello fellow indie hackers / devs / entrepreneurs!
I have been a mobile app developer for most of my career - and there are a few things I see myself repeating in quite a lot of the apps I build. So I came up with SwiftApps, https://www.swiftapps.dev/, a cheap boilerplate / starter pack to get you quickly started on building and launching your Android App FAST!
To test out this boilerplate and see what hackers out there would want in their mobile apps, I am providing free Android Apps built using SwiftApps. This is what you'd get:
- An APK / AAB file ready to be published to the Play Store
- The kotlin code that was used to build the app
- Access to a discord community to support any further development
So put down your ideas / requirement in the comments below - just make sure that the app you want to build will at most contains 5 screens!
There is a Twitter thread too, where you can put up your requirements as well - https://x.com/brhn_dev/status/1754150981397537088?s=20
Great initiative Burhan! 🙌
Wouldnt have been possible without shipped.club! 🫡🫡
This is really cool man thanks for the find. I wanted to ask you if you have any opinions on creating dual Android and iOS apps through expo and if there was a specific package or system you recommended?
Thanks!
I have used React before, but don't have a lot of experience with Expo, unfortunately. 😞
I have been looking into Kotlin Multiplatform tho which could support cross-platform apps - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/kotlin-multiplatform-dev/multiplatform-integrate-in-existing-app.html#make-your-code-cross-platform
Have you already built an app with React ?
Yeah I actually have a web app that I converted to a react native project. It was an absolute pain getting the necessary libraries working since every other minute I'd run into a deprecation error and I was wondering what other people were doing for iOS and Android releases.
Thanks for the link!
Oh yeah for sure, React is a pain too when you want to support more and more features.
Feel free to DM me with your app and we could try to build it with the SwiftApps boilerplate and with Kotlin Multi-Platform, it shouldnt take a lot of effort to be able to support iOS too with the same codebase. 😄
Very cool business, best of luck with your launch!
As an Android developer, how do you feel about the future of native apps with PWAs that can now be syndicated as APKs? Do you think this will change the landscape for webapp companies looking to go mobile over time or will native apps continue to dominate the landscape?
Thanks!
Think PWA's have been around for a while now, they're great if you have a web app and want the cheaper route to get into the mobile ecosystem - but performance wise, PWAs are far behind native apps and I have seen their API lacking.
PWAs are a great way to get started on a project, but then you try to expand your app and get stuck, people then tend to make the expensive switch to native apps 😄
Although web dev seems to be catching up with native, its difficult to say how Apple and Android ecosystems evolve in the future and how PWAs could keep up with that.
Very true. PWA permissions on Android have come a long way but Apple hasn't played along. The ecosystem bifurcation makes it hard to live up to the "write once, run anywhere" vision.
Yeah, Apple does seem to have started allowing Push Notifications on PWAs but they definitly dont seem to like them and probably take a while for them to be available on App Store, if ever!