Your Business Deserves a Native App
Many of your team's apps are web pages in disguise, and you pay for it in waiting. When Shopify rebuilt its shopping app as native, it started opening twice as fast on Android. Here's what native could do for your business.
Does your laptop fan spin up when a few work apps are open? Does someone on your team stare at a loading spinner every few minutes? It’s probably not the computer. It’s how the apps are built.
Your apps are web pages in disguise
Many of the apps your team uses every day aren’t really apps. Slack, Notion, Discord and VS Code are each built from web pages, packed together with their own copy of a web browser using a tool called Electron. They look like apps, but every one of them runs a full browser underneath.
Software companies build this way because one codebase runs on Windows, the Mac and the web, and that saves them money. The cost lands on you instead.
What that costs your business
- Waiting. Every click goes through the browser’s machinery before the screen changes, and often waits for a server too. It’s a fraction of a second, for every person, on every click, all day.
- Hardware. Every app carries its own browser and needs its own memory. Laptops get replaced because the software got heavier, not because the work changed.
- Downtime. When the internet drops, many web-based tools simply stop.
Shopify just switched to real native apps
In 2020, Shopify took the same shortcut for its phone apps: one shared codebase, written in JavaScript like a web page, running on both the iPhone and Android. In September 2026 it switched to real native apps, written separately for each kind of phone. The reason is coding agents: with them, building each feature twice “no longer carries the cost it used to.” Rebuilding the first app, Shop, took six engineers 12 weeks:
For the people using Shop, that means:
- On Android, the app opens in 2.2 seconds instead of 4.4.
- About 1 in 2,000 sessions crashes, down from about 1 in 200. In a shopping app, a crash can be an abandoned cart.
- The Android download is 109 MB smaller.
The main Shopify app, Point of Sale and Inbox are next.
I did the same with a tool I use every day
DeepSeek’s coding agent runs as a page in a browser tab, with a server behind it. I rewrote it as a native Mac app. It looks the same and does the same job:
I measured these on my own Mac during real sessions, so they’re ballpark numbers, not a benchmark. When the native app sits idle, it uses no processor time at all.
What a native app does for your business
- It opens and reacts instantly, for everyone on the team.
- It keeps working when the internet drops, and syncs when it’s back.
- It runs fine on the laptops you already have.
- Your data stays on your own computers or your own server.
- It talks directly to label printers, barcode scanners and scales.
- There are no per-seat monthly fees. You own it.
Why I can build it for you
I’ve been building native apps since 2008, for phones and for desktops. Coding agents now write most of the code, so a native app costs a fraction of what it used to. What still takes experience is deciding what to build, testing it and making it fast. That’s what you pay me for, at a fixed price, with the app ready in days or weeks.
Tell me what’s slowing your team down
Name the tool and what bothers you about it. Within 2 working days, I’ll tell you honestly whether a native version is worth it and what it would cost.
