I run a mobile team of ~30 folks. In 2015 we experimented with RN for 3 months before deciding that it was not a good fit for us. I'm interested in stories from the alternate reality where we took the react-native path instead.

I'm NOT particularly interested in stories about single devs making prototypes for a weekend. React Native has a delightful experience for this use-case, but it does not directly transfer to being a good experience for a larger team with serious product goals.

Thanks

We’ve been building mobile apps together for seven years and have had several successes. One thing that’s always bothered us though is how much harder it is to build a mobile app than a website. If you’ve built an app with React Native before you’re familiar with the pains of working with both Xcode and Android Studio, writing tons of boilerplate before you can even start making the app, setting up state management, and of course going through the dreaded app review. We decided to build a platform that would make the app development process faster.

We’ve seen the success of new code-gen platforms like v0 and wanted something for React Native that goes further. We built an AI app generator that takes a user's prompt and creates a custom React Native app with an instant live preview.

Here’s a 5min demo where we recreated the Hacker News UI: https://youtu.be/f3lzBRBUous

a0.dev is great for quickly prototyping components and screens in React Native and users are able to copy the code from our generator into their preferred development environment. Our landing page has a couple of example prompts, but we encourage you to get creative when trying it out. We’ve had success generating not only functional screens like an Instagram Feed but also 2d games like Minesweeper or Flappy Bird.

Our chat has a “UI Expert” and “Advanced Logic” model users can switch between depending on the task at hand. Users can upgrade from working on a single screen to creating a full app by clicking on the “Need a Full App” button in the top right of the page. This changes the scope from a standalone chat with a single file to a full project that can include multiple chats and files. We launched an IOS app that users can download in order to preview the app on a physical device. We find that many apps look and feel better on a physical device so we recommend trying it out.

Our goal is to continue to improve the app generator while adding more features to help developers get their apps to the app store and make money from those apps. The main features on our roadmap right now are a Supabase integration and a “one click submit” button to let developers publish their app to the App Store.

There are a few limitations to note. We’re working on releasing our Android app, but Android users should be able to preview their app using the Expo Go App. The app is running React Native Web in the browser so any dependencies that don’t support web won’t work with the web preview but should work on the phone. There are also some dependencies that our system can’t handle because they require native modules that aren’t packaged into our app currently.

We hope you guys will check it out and try making an app with a0.dev. We’re available on Discord around the clock to help developers with any problems they may face and want to guide people to actually releasing their app on the App Store. Let us know what features you’d like to see and any problems you’ve faced building apps, we’d love to hear about your experience.

Here’s the link again to check it out: (https://a0.dev)

We dropped the need to sign up for the first message so you can just jump in and try it out.

Looking forward to your thoughts!