Turbo Native: Hybrid apps for iOS & Android
Turbo Native is ideal for building hybrid apps for iOS and Android. You can use your existing server-rendered HTML to get baseline coverage of your app’s functionality in a native wrapper. Then you can spend all the time you saved on making the few screens that really benefit from high-fidelity native controls even better.
An application like Basecamp has hundreds of screens. Rewriting every single one of those screens would be an enormous task with very little benefit. Better to reserve the native firepower for high-touch interactions that really demand the highest fidelity. Something like the “New For You” inbox in Basecamp, for example, where we use swipe controls that need to feel just right. But most pages, like the one showing a single message, wouldn’t really be any better if they were completely native.
Going hybrid doesn’t just speed up your development process, it also gives you more freedom to upgrade your app without going through the slow and onerous app store release processes. Anything that’s done in HTML can be changed in your web application, and instantly be available to all users. No waiting for Big Tech to approve your changes, no waiting for users to upgrade.
Turbo Native assumes you’re using the recommended development practices available for iOS and Android. This is not a framework that abstracts native APIs away or even tries to let your native code be shareable between platforms. The part that’s shareable is the HTML that’s rendered server-side. But the native controls are written in the recommended native APIs.