Mobile Apps with Hotwire Native

Hotwire Native is our mobile technology of first choice for turning a Ruby on Rails web application into iOS and Android apps, without standing up a separate native codebase and team.

Why Hotwire Native?

Traditional native development means slow development cycles, large specialized iOS and Android teams, building every feature twice, and waiting on app store review for every fix. Hotwire Native removes most of that friction:

• Build your screens once, in HTML and CSS, and reuse them across every platform - the same Rails views that power your web app power the app
• Faster updates - most fixes and features ship through your normal web deploy and skip app store review entirely
• Small teams can ship real apps - no separate native team required to have a “highly functional, beautiful, and sustainable” mobile app
• Full native API access from day one - camera, push notifications, and the rest of the native SDK are available immediately, not bolted on later

How it works

Hotwire Native wraps a web view in a native iOS/Android shell that renders the HTML your server already sends. Navigation and transition animations are handled natively, so it feels like a native app even though the screens are your existing web views. Where plain HTML/CSS isn’t enough, we drop down to Bridge Components or fully native screens for that specific part of the app

• without giving up the rest of the shared codebase.

It supports both iOS and Android, and it’s the natural next step for any project already built on Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus) - the screens are already there, we just wrap them.

What we set up

• Wrapping an existing Rails/Hotwire application in native iOS and Android shells
• Bridge Components for the native features a web view can’t cover on its own (camera, push notifications, biometrics, …)
• App store and Play Store release pipelines, wired into Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery the same way as our web deployments
• Test coverage for the shared screens, following our approach to Test Driven Development

Summary

If your product already runs on Rails, Hotwire Native gets you real iOS and Android apps without duplicating the application in Swift and Kotlin - and most updates reach users without waiting on a store review.

Want a mobile app without a separate mobile codebase? Get in touch.