Siphon
Quickly build React native apps without XCode
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Alex Patow

Siphon - Quickly build React native apps without XCode

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Alex Patow
Hunter
Found this today, really easy to use. Great 5 min tutorial, CLI, and sandbox app. Nice work!
James Potter
Maker
@alex_patow one of the developers here -- thanks Alex, much appreciated :)
Alex Patow
Hunter
@rahrahyah No problem! Could you tell us a bit more about your product?
James Potter
Maker
@alex_patow sure, we think the experience of building native mobile apps is pretty bad right now and we're creating the tool we would have wanted. Siphon is in alpha right now but you can run apps in the iOS sandbox. We aim to release standalone simulator/device support soon, then app publishing (to the App Store) by the end of January. After that, all of the same features will be coming for Android :)
Brandon Ramirez
Great job guys! Haven't played much with React Native, but excited to try this out.... Had a question about a statement towards the end of the video, was hoping you could elaborate: "Note that for most changes to your production apps you can push changes to Siphon, and your users will receive the updates over the air; you won't need to go through the app store approval process again." At first glance this seems to contradict item 2.7 of the App Store review guidelines (https://developer.apple.com/app-...): "Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected." What types of changes to production apps do you expect will be able to be made w/o going through the app store approval process again? Thanks!
James Potter
Maker
@rezbrandon Hey Brandon, good question. As only JavaScript code is downloaded over-the-air we adhere to Section 3.3.2 of the iOS Developer Program agreement, which you can find here: https://developer.apple.com/prog... We're also aware of production apps currently in the App Store that are doing this with React Native, including our own Siphon Sandbox app. It's possible that Apple might change their mind on this, but so far they've been pretty open minded. For updates to the app binary itself you will still need to go through the approval process. That includes changing your app icon or other metadata, or updating to a new version of React Native. Hope that helps :)
Mike Du Russel
Great job! This is really impressive and can speed up app development significantly.
Bilal Budhani
Super Impressive! I really like the idea of being able to update all development devices with "push" command and ability to directly publish to App stores from command line. From what I see, this can do to mobile app development what Heroku did to devOps. Kudos @rahrahyah and team.
James Potter
Maker
@bilalbudhani thanks! Yes, Heroku has definitely provided some inspiration for our command-line interface.
Corey Stone
Impressive stuff! Almost seems too good to be true (I had a "wait, is this an April Fool's product" moment for a second - haha)
Ulas Bilgenoglu
Wow, I can only say wow :) I think this will be amazing, especially if you're mobile app development house. Didn't have time to try react yet, but I think what you accomplished is amazing. Will try it soon :)
Anthony Lee
What an interesting approach! I'm curious to see how pushing to the App Store feature will work.
James Potter
Maker
@anthonygawonlee Thanks, we hope to have that feature ready by the end of January.
Paul Tomkinson
Dead pool according to website. Had potential. Likes what was there. Best of luck on next endeavor guys. Siphon is shutting down on 27th July 2016. To our customers, users and supporters: unfortunately this is the end of the road for Siphon. Our long-term goal was to create the most developer friendly end-to-end publishing platform for mobile apps. Due to some inherent limitations in the early design decisions that we made (in particular the inability to compile your own native modules with Siphon) we have come to the regrettable conclusion that this vision is not possible at this time. We hoped that these native bridged modules would mature and become less important over time, but this has turned out to not be the case. All apps created using Siphon are fully compatible with the standard React Native framework and transferring your app should only take a few minutes. Please email us if you need any help migrating your app. Thanks to everyone who supported us over the past few months.
Alex Patow
Hunter
@rahrahyah Great, thanks! Looking forward to future releases
Fraser Smith
This looks great. I have just one question. Once you have built your app, can it then be bundled into a stand-alone app or do all siphon apps require the sandbox forever?
James Potter
Maker
@frassmith hey Fraser -- the sandbox is only intended for initial testing and prototyping. In an upcoming release you'll be able to run the app standalone in the simulator or developer device. Then publish it (standalone) to the App Store.
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