Turning a web app into a native mobile app While developing my app ThisToDish on Replit, I knew I was limited to deploying it as a web app only. That was fine for testing — but my goal was to publish it on the Google Play Store and get it into people’s hands as a native app. I experimented with a few different approaches, but most of them didn’t quite work. Then I came across Median.co — a simple but powerful tool. Here’s how it works: 🔹 Paste in the URL from your web app (in my case, hosted on Replit). 🔹 Configure a few settings — app name, logos, branding, behaviour. 🔹 Build the app and download either an APK or AAB file. 🔹 Upload that to the Play Console → closed testing → open testing → production release. That process was the bridge between having a working web app and having a native Android app live on Google Play. It saved me time, frustration, and probably a lot of extra dev work. For indie founders, side-hustlers, and non-coders like me, tools like Replit + Median.co open the door to actually shipping. 👉 Curious to hear — has anyone else used Median or similar tools to ship their first app? Median.co – Convert your website to iOS & Android native apps https://lnkd.in/e4M7smrD
Great work, can you share links to the product
Robert De Gouveia Are you certain this will be a native app? From what I understand, it seems like it would only be a web view rather than a true native application.
Robert De Gouveia Really cool breakdown 👏 Love how tools like this are lowering the barrier to actually shipping. For indie founders, getting something into users’ hands fast often matters more than a perfect tech stack — this is a great example of that 🚀
this is the future
What do you think is happening behind the scenes? That "native mobile app" is using a WebView to render the web app, which means terrible UX on actual phones, it's as if you have the website open in your mobile browser, except the mobile browser. The only way to convert a web app to a truly native app right now is to have it rewritten in a framework that can publish everywhere, such as Expo.
Senior DevOps Engineer • Helping Companies Scale With Reliable Cost-Efficient Cloud Infrastructure and End-to-End DevOps Practices
2wThank you for sharing Robert De Gouveia