Show HN: Bravo – Turn designs into native iOS and Android apps without coding | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bravo – Turn designs into native iOS and Android apps without coding

bravostudio.app

94 pointsdiggan22 comments

Hello HN!

This is a project we've (ten people team, four developers) been working on since about May this year. It currently supports importing a design from Figma (more to come), setting up API requests and binding the output of the API requests to design elements from your Figma document. From this, we then generate native applications (no webviews nor React Native) that you can preview directly in the phone. You can also create a build where you get the full native app as a binary (IPA for iOS and apk for Android) that you can ship to the app store.

Bit behind the scenes:

- Android version using Kotlin

- iOS version using Swift

- Backend written in JS with NestJS

- Frontend (built by my) made in ClojureScript with reagent and re-frame

Been a fun experience setting up everything from 0 and it's probably the largest project I've done myself with ClojureScript and it's been an absolute bliss to use it. If you're a frontend developer (or developer who wants to do frontend), you should definitely try out ClojureScript and see how it feels.

Hoping to share more experiences and lessons in the future around the development of the platform. In the meantime, any feedback is good feedback, so please don't hold back, y'all usually pretty good at that!

Hope you like it, Thanks!

Congrats! Any reason you didn't go with clojure/clojurescript for backend also?

Thanks! We're two different people building the backend and frontend. I'm building the frontend and I'm the most productive with Clojure/ClojureScript and the developer building the backend is more productive with Node.js/TypeScript

This seems like a good start. I've often wondered why someone hasn't recreated something akin to a modern VB6. Allow users to drag/drop things, add some glue code in some intermediate language, and output to Android, IOS, or even native. Java came somewhat close, but I think if done well could be a huge success.

Thanks, "a good start" is what we think too, still long way to go. Yeah, I think that's a step further than what we're focusing on now, enabling Figma (and Sketch et al in the future) users to import their designs, add API connections and bind design elements to API output/input. Basically making designers avoid having to write code (hearsay here on HN but here we are :) )

I think you meant heresy...

But don’t underestimate HN as a codemonkey hive; there are plenty of folks here who understand the value of business velocity and low barriers for market entry.

Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker, but thank you for correcting me so I don't repeat it.

Yeah, absolutely, it wasn't called Startup News before for nothing. Was more tongue in cheek but hard to transmit that fully I guess.

I think there is a real demand for having a quick drag and drop for UI components and dive into code for other changes. I have searched and searched and so far I haven't found anything as good as VB6. It is 2019 now.sign!

I’m sure it’s useful to some people at this stage but for me I see that logins and real rest api support are future goals which makes me deeply suspicious since this kind of product has burned me about a half dozen times now... starting strong but never getting to a point where I can actually use it for real serious business work beyond the demo pre-prototype stage.

So how far away are the rest api and user login features? Bonus points if your looking to support OpenID Connect for user authentication.

> real rest api support

Currently we do support "real REST API" as-in you can use any HTTP API. What's missing is making sure POST and other methods actually are useful in that they can use/deliver values from other requests. Let me know if there is something specific you're missing for this.

> user login features

User login features are definitely on the roadmap but unclear right now how it will be integrated. We might go with something like Auth0 which gives bunch of different integrations built-in (like OpenID Connect). If you'd be open to talk more exact needs and I can give a more exact answer. (happy to answer as a comment here or email [victor@bravostudio.app])

Thanks a lot for the feedback, super helpful!

That’s great to hear about the rest APIs, I was looking on the website and couldn’t find the documentation about them, I’m guessing it might be harder to find while browsing on my phone so my bad if it’s somewhere obvious and I missed it.

And on the topic of user logins, I actually mentioned OpenID Connect because I’m using Auth0 at work and for my own personal projects, so if you’re looking at supporting Auth0 directly that’s fantastic news for me! :-D

> I was looking on the website and couldn’t find the documentation about them

Yeah, we have plenty of great documentation already but doesn't mean we don't want more. Just takes time :)

In the meantime, there is a tutorial that goes through how the flow works with APIs here: https://www.notion.so/bravostudio/Tutorial-Connect-data-to-d...

> And on the topic of user logins, I actually mentioned OpenID Connect because I’m using Auth0 at work and for my own personal projects, so if you’re looking at supporting Auth0 directly that’s fantastic news for me! :-D

Ah, that's cool, great data-point to have! Thank you for the overall feedback

There is a similar project called Neonto Studio: https://neonto.com/nativestudio The code Neontov generates is not exactly perfect, but it's still a nice starting point.

Bravo seems like a nicer version of this since it generates Swift / Kotlin code.

Well that's not exact, Bravo it's free.

Also Bravo doesn't generate any code at all, it's built with Swift and Kotlin, but it's a nocode platform, where you get the final packages (ipa and apk), but not the code.

Also Bravo allows to add all the backend and API logic from the same tool, so it's pretty fast to create a working app with API calls.

Hope I brought some light!

While I get what you're saying, I do find it a bit silly to say "Bravo doesn't generate any code at all", when it plainly does - the app developer (or whatever you want to call them) just doesn't get to see it, since all they get is the binaries built from the code.

"doesnt output source code" would work.

Neonto Studio does let you connect to backend logic. There's a plugin API which covers the basic CRUD operations as well as login/auth.

I think it ships with a couple of basic ones like Google Sheets and Generic JSON, but the general idea is that customers write their own.

Source: I was the original author of Neonto Studio years ago :)

There's a free version of the same product for React only at https://reactstudio.com

Sorry, but your website is awful.

Vertical scroll, then horizontal scroll, then finally a video that appears on a button's hover.

Yeech!

Thanks for the feedback, happy that you wrote concretely about what you didn't like.

Great idea but Figma is not the best...Build for sketch!

Thanks! Yeah, native integration Sketch would be nice. Guess right now you could try to import your Sketch file into Figma and then get it into Bravo. Try it at your own risk!

Don't build for sketch, I am not going to buy a mac just to use your app.

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