Hey guys!
My name is Roberto. Over the last few months I’ve been building an app in Glide for my community in Tulum. During the process, I did a lot of research about how PWAs work, and I came across many no-code tools—along with a lot of outdated information saying that Glide apps can’t be published on the App Store or Play Store.
While searching, I found some tools that claim to convert a Glide PWA into React Native code so it can be published as a “native app.” I’m interested if someone already use one (or others) of this tools before, and check if worked, I’m afraid to lose information for lose my progress… these are some of the ones I found:
My app already has around 500 users, but one big challenge is that many people don’t read the instructions from Glide on how to “download” the app (Share → Add to Home Screen). So they sign in on the web once and then never come back. That’s why I’m trying to make the installation process more practical for them.
I’d like to keep the app on Glide because it took me a couple of months to build, and at first it was just a test to see if I could actually create something. Now it’s real, functional, and I want to keep developing it.
I wanted to ask this community because I’m not an expert at all—honestly, I have no idea how I built what I built. I was guided mostly by Robert Petitto videos and a lot of ChatGPT help.
Thanks for the support!
PWA’s are web applications. They are still just web pages that act like traditional apps, but still run within a browser.
Glide does not officially support any conversions for publishing to app stores…meaning if something doesn’t work right, you will not get support directly from Glide. With that said, people still do it successfully.
To be clear though, these are just wrappers that wrap your app in type a browser shell to display your web base app, but using a native app shell. There is no code conversion or anything like that to make it a truly native app. Your app still lives within Glide on the web and relies on a connection to Glide servers. There isn’t a whole lot of difference between installing as a PWA and installing as a native app as its running in a browser shell either way. The only real difference with the wrappers is having something to submit to the app stores.
Of the services you listed, I think Nokib has come up most frequently and some trusted users have had good things to say. Nativator used to be popular, but I haven’t heard much from them recently and if I recall many had a bad experience. I haven’t heard of the other two.
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Thansk so much Jeff,
This is what I was waiting to hear. I understand better now, I actually think for me it’s really important to be easy and “most common” instalation process like appstore or playstore, but I don’t know what kind of risks might happen if I do it with a not supported app like this ones.
I’ll make more research, and wait if some more users have something to say.
Thanks so much!
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