How To Create App For Website

If you already have a website and want an app for it, there are three ways to get there and they differ by roughly two orders of magnitude in effort. Choosing the cheapest one that meets your actual requirement is the entire decision.

We sell source code you clone and run yourself. This page answers the question first, and the product section is at the end where you can skip it.

The three routes

Start at the left and move right only when a specific requirement forces it. The two requirements that genuinely force a move are needing to be in an app store, and needing a device capability the browser does not expose.

The free version first: make the site installable

Adding a web app manifest and a service worker turns a website into something a phone will install to the home screen, launch without browser chrome, and open offline. This is a real capability rather than a trick, and on a modern site it is a small amount of work.

When you need the app stores

Being in the stores is a distribution and credibility decision more than a technical one. Some audiences look for an app and will not install from a browser, and some organisations require a store listing before they will adopt something.

If that is the requirement, wrapping is the middle route: your web app runs inside a thin native shell that can be submitted to the stores. Capacitor is the common choice for this and it is an open source project, theirs rather than ours. Two things to know before committing. Store review has rejected apps that are purely a website in a shell with no added value, so plan for at least push notifications or offline behaviour. And you take on the release cycle, meaning a store submission for updates that used to be a deploy.

When native is genuinely justified

Background location, Bluetooth peripherals, heavy offline data, tight camera control, or performance that a browser cannot reach. Also anything where the app is the product rather than an alternative way to reach a website.

If none of those apply, native is a large ongoing commitment bought for reasons that will not survive the first year of maintenance.

The mistake worth avoiding

Building the app as a separate product with its own backend. Whichever route you take, the app should talk to the same API as the website, or you have two systems that drift and two places to fix every bug.

That is the practical argument for deciding your API boundary before you decide your app strategy: a site whose data comes from a typed API can be wrapped, installed, or given a native client later, while one that renders everything on the server has to be partly rebuilt for any of them.

Where this stack fits

If you already have a website, none of the above needs us; make it installable and see whether that is enough.

If you are earlier than that and the app is part of something you are building, this stack is a React frontend and a Hono backend with a typed client between them, which is the boundary described above. The native app shell layout pack covers the shell for a desktop-style application, and the notifications pack handles in-app and email notifications, though push to a phone is a separate integration you would add.

There is no mobile app in the box, no wrapper, and no store submission tooling. What there is is the API boundary that makes any of the three routes possible later, plus accounts, organizations, billing, and an admin app.

Below are the templates and packs. If your question was how to get your existing site onto a home screen, the manifest and service worker above are the whole answer and you can stop there.