Building an AI Mobile App Builder

Freestyle is the platform for building AI Mobile App Builders. There are many AI Mobile App Builder companies already on the platform, and we have specialized utilities to help you.

Pre-requisites

This guide is a follow up to the generic AI App Builder guide. Everything about managing code, dev servers and deployments for web servers applies for mobile app builders too.

Intro

This guide goes over the utilities we have for AI Mobile App Builders and best practices we've seen for building them.

We recommend using Expo as the base for your mobile app. Expo is a framework and platform for universal React applications. It works well for AI App Builders because:

• Expo is a React based framework, AI is great at React.
• Expo has hot reload, which makes iteration fast.
• Expo has web support for both previews and production, this makes previewing and debugging the easy, it also makes sharing the app with your users easy.
• Freestyle has thousands of Expo Apps running on it, so we know how to make it work well.

Dev Servers

When using Dev Servers, your users can view the web preview through the FreestyleDevServer.

For viewing on mobile devices, you can use the ephemeralUrl in Expo Go Via a QR Code, or via any Expo Developer Build Client. However, these URL's are ephemeral, so we recommend proxying them through another router server that you can control, to define a permanent URL for the Expo Client to pull from.

Deploy

Freestyle offers an Expo bundling system that makes our builds compatible with the Expo Updates standard, and visible on a website. When enabled, if you deploy to someapp.style.dev (or any domain), your users will be able to view the website at that domain, and if an Expo Client is pointed at that domain it will use it as the bundle source.

To enable this, you should build your app on us with Freestyle Auto Building. You can enable this by adding build: true to your deployment configurations.

Notes

• Freestyle Expo Auto Building currently does not support Android or code signing, we're working on it.
• Freestyle Expo Auto Builds currently support static or single web apps, we're working on supporting server mode.
• We recommend using Expo + Hono/some external server rather than Expo + Expo API Routes — Expo API Routes seem to have shockingly bad performance and not work with hot reloading. This can be deployed separately from the app and used by it.