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Comment by Aulig | Hacker News Reader

I turn existing websites into apps at https://webtoapp.design

I went with Flask (python) + Bootstrap for my website.

The apps are created in Flutter, which was a great choice looking back on it. This allows me to have 1 codebase for both Android & iOS apps (most customers want both). If developing an app for just Android would be 100% effort, developing an app for Android and iOS with Flutter is around 130% effort I'd say. Those additional 30% mostly come from inconsistencies in Flutter between Android & iOS and from desired differences between the platforms, e.g. Material vs Cupertino design.

I developed native Android apps before and now I'd even use Flutter if I wanted to just create an ordinary Android app. It's just so much nicer to use in my opinion.

Summary: Flutter was a great choice, Flask is fine too, nothing to complain about there.

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Any particular reason for choosing Flutter over React Native?

Also seems like a very low price tag, I guess you're working with cheaper developers, have some automation in place and/or take on simple websites? Or maybe I overestimate the difficulty of doing this?

$850 for both android + ios is about a day's worth of work as a medium paid contractor in the U.S, and I imagine it takes longer than that to do this.

I hadn't worked with React or javascript before this project, but did a small Flutter project in university. I found dart easy to pick up because it's quite similar to Java, which I've used quite a bit. Also I find that there's more progress being made with Flutter (with Google as a backer), than with React native. But I might be in a bubble there.

Creating the apps is mostly automated and the apps use webviews along with a few native components. Without webviews and automation this would never be possible at that price point, you're totally right.

There's lots of competitors that offer pure webview apps at ridiculous prices (I've seen $5 even). You can't publish those in the app store though (even if you manage to submit it for review without any help). So native components and help with publishing the apps are quite essential. And that's where a lot of the involved effort lies: communicating and helping customers.

Working on improving that day by day though :)

How long did you spend on the Droste effect on your homepage? :D

Haha i spent like 3 days on that image in total. The starting point of the image is from undraw.co (i think it's called "web app"). First I wanted to use recursion but in the end it was a lot easier to just make a simple loop to nest the image 3 times or so (beyond that it just unnecessarily increases the DOM size without a big visual difference)

Also make sure to hover the image, it's animated! I love how the nested images get animated too.

All in all it was fun to work on and I learned a lot about SVG while I had nothing super important to do :)

It sparked joy, I like it!

Wow sounds fun, the idea for the website sounds fun as well and congrats on the launch.

Small suggestion, could you not automatically display the pricing according to the location of the IP address of the user. My IP is being guessed as its from Indonesia and I see pricing that I am unable to read. And I don't see an easy way to look at the pricing in a more familiar currency.

Far too many websites do this, its so annoying :(

Thanks for the feedback! That makes sense, thanks for letting me know. I fetch the prices via an API from my payment processor, which does the guessing.

I'll add it to my todo list to offer a manual override :)

.lifting-card {height: 100%}

If you like the column heights aligned on /convert/appdetails.

Thanks for the tip! I might use that, need to think about a good way to deal with the additional white space in the card :)

Is most of the design just bootstrap from scratch? Very nice

Thank you! Yes, it's almost exclusively bootstrap :)

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