ShipNative

What it is

ShipNative is an AI mobile app builder. Its tagline reads "Build mobile apps with AI. Describe, preview, and ship to iOS & Android in minutes," and its home page promises a full-stack app "ready for the App Store and Google Play." It is written for people who want a real native app and would rather describe it than assemble it. The company's how-to guide names that audience: first-time founders validating an idea, designers who want to turn Figma frames into a real device experience, product managers building demos for investors, and developers who want to skip boilerplate. On that guide, the company says AI app builders like it "generate real React Native code from a plain-text description."

The product's stance is clear from its pages. It wants to be a no-code experience with a real codebase underneath, one you can hand to a developer later.

What you build and how

The editor is a conversation, run by 3 agents. The home page says "Three AI agents work on your app: a Planner, a Designer and a Builder. You approve every step." The first step belongs to the Planner, which asks what the app should do best, which screens to start with and how people sign in. Suggested answers are already picked, so you can accept them or change them. The second step is approval of a plan. Screens, data and a design system are laid out before any code is written, and you can ask for changes in chat and then approve. The third step is the build. The site says every build is "type-checked, bundled and opened screen by screen," and that when something breaks "the Builder repairs it or tells you what failed."

You can start in more than one way. The site lists Text to App, AI App Generator from Screenshot and PRD to Mobile App as features, and the how-to guide describes the tool taking "AI text/screenshot" input. The guide's advice for the prompt is to write a single paragraph about what the app does, who uses it and what the 2 to 4 main screens are, written from the user's point of view rather than as a feature list. It suggests naming the navigation pattern ("tab navigation" for a bottom tab bar, "stack navigation" for a back-button flow) to improve routing, and adding visual direction such as dark mode or layout style.

The guide sets out an 8-step path from idea to store, grouped as Plan, Build, Test and Ship. A live interactive preview arrives in under 2 minutes. You then tap through every screen and fix what is wrong with plain-English requests such as moving a search bar or changing a button color; each change regenerates the relevant part of the app, and the guide says most apps reach a shippable state in 3 to 8 iterations. It recommends one change per prompt, because stacked requests sometimes produce unexpected results.

The output is the point. The home page calls it "a standard Expo project": you download the source and build it with Expo EAS. A sample file tree on the page shows a budgeting app with tabs for spending, budgets and profile, an add-transaction screen, a components folder, a store file, and a supabase/migrations folder alongside app.json and package.json. The company says "database migrations ship inside the project, so nothing is locked to ShipNative." The "built on what you already trust" strip on the home page names Expo, React Native, Supabase, Anthropic and OpenAI, along with the App Store and Google Play. That is a list of technologies it works with, not a customer list.

Testing happens on real devices. The guide has you run the Expo project locally to open it in the iOS Simulator or Android Emulator, then create a development build with EAS to install on a phone and share with 3 to 5 people who match your target user. Its point is that you are "running real native code, not a web simulation."

Publishing is a stated step, and the company is open about the costs outside its own. EAS Build compiles the app to iOS and Android binaries in the cloud, and the guide says the first build takes 15 to 30 minutes. You then submit with EAS to App Store Connect and Google Play. Publishing needs an Apple Developer account at $99 per year and a Google Play Developer account at a one-time $25. The guide says "Most first apps reach the App Store within 2 business days," and estimates about 4 to 6 hours of active work for a simple 3 to 4 screen app.

For AI builders, the relevant detail is how the company talks about lock-in. A blog post argues there are "two fundamentally different products wearing the same label." One group is "no code, no code ever," where your app lives on the platform's hosting. The other is "no code required, code available," and the company places ShipNative there. In its framing, export is "insurance, not a feature," and it suggests checking whether a developer recognizes a standard Expo layout and typed components in any sample project.

The site also carries free tools, which it lists as an App Cost Calculator, App Name Generator, App Store Keyword Tool and React Native Components, plus a Discord link and an FAQ.

Plans and limits

The home page offers a trial. It says "Try it free for 3 days," with "5 credits to build your first app, then Pro at $29 a month," and adds "Cancel any time before day 3 and pay nothing." The start button carries the line "No credit card required". The how-to guide describes the entry point as "free to start" and says you can generate and preview an app with no payment required.

On code, the claim is direct. The how-to page says ShipNative generates real React Native code "with no platform lock-in," and that if your app gains traction, "a developer can extend the exported codebase." On suitability, it lists productivity apps, fitness trackers, e-commerce stores, social apps, dashboards, marketplace apps, booking flows and news readers as typical builds. It adds that "apps with standard mobile UI patterns generate most accurately," and that real-time multiplayer or deeply custom animations may need code additions after generation.

On store acceptance, the company says Apple rejects thin wrappers under guideline 4.2, and that a no-code app can only reach the App Store if its output is real native code, which is the case ShipNative makes for its React Native output.

Who it suits

ShipNative suits a founder validating an app idea, and a freelancer who wants to deliver a repository the client can keep. A team that expects to hire developers later gets a starting point they can read. The agent flow, with a plan to approve before any code is written, helps people who are unsure how to describe an app, and a designer or product manager can get from a description to a device build in an afternoon.

It suits people less who want a visual canvas to drag things around in, since the work happens through chat and approval. It is also not an internal-tools platform: the company's own examples are store-bound mobile apps. The publishing steps use the Expo command line, so a non-technical builder should be ready to follow terminal instructions. Teams with heavy animation or multiplayer needs should expect hand-written code after the first generation, as the guide itself says.