FUTO Notes 1.5.0 — full native mobile

The headline here is fully native apps for Android and iPhone. I would love feedback on this.

I’m a heavy user of the app on iOS and desktop. I found that the mobile app was not quite what I wanted. It didn’t feel solid, if that makes sense. My original strategy was to use Tauri to build a cross-platform app. Write once, deploy everywhere. Many of my competitors do something similar.

I could have spent more time refining the mobile experience, but I was fighting something fundamental: the mobile web experience for most apps is just not that great. Especially compared to full-native apps.

Of course, writing a full-native iOS and Android version of FUTO Notes would be costly in terms of time. Right??

I’ve been playing around with the idea of software factories. Instead of writing the thing, you write the thing that writes the thing. So in my case, I handed Claude the Tauri app and told it to make spec documents for it — basically a written description of the entire app. It looked at the code and drove the app via simulator to generate the docs. Then I asked Claude to make a native iOS and Android version of the app using the spec documents, but keeping the existing editor the same (a webview), and using the Rust core for any business logic. In other words, the actual Swift/Kotlin code is acting as a thin layer between the webview editor and the Rust core.

I was thoroughly impressed by the results. The app feels better, looks nicer, and should perform better, too.

But I want your feedback! Do you like the app better, now? Are you finding new bugs?