iOS Good way to make a web based app with templates?

[americanGTA]

Xcode is a bit complicated for me because i'm not a coder. I'm trying to find an easy way to create web based apps with a program that I can get a bunch of templates for. I want the web based apps to work well with IOS.

The web based apps don't have to be complicated. I want them to contain some basic information like pictures, a map, a phone number and a couple others things.

I want to have the ability to replicate the simple apps quickly. I've found some programs, app.cat, Seattle clouds, app makr, and wix but hosting /publishing monthly fees will add up too much for the amount of apps I want to make. Does anyone know of anything more cost effective for multiple apps?

 

[D.T.]

It sounds like you just want to develop web apps that are responsive/mobile-friendly and if that’s the case, there are tons of options for you. Start with something like Bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com

You can do some really slick things with HTML5/CSS3/JQuery/etc. We ported our iOS app to a mobile-web interface (for interim solution to a native Android app) and it was pretty outstanding. I’ve seen a few web apps that are almost indistinguishable from native iOS apps.

Now I don’t know your whole plan, but _if_ you did want to get exposure through the App Store, you could conceivably make a super simple app that’s simply a UIWebView wrapper that points to the web app - however, you’re going to lose several “native Safari” features one of which has a big impact on performance. There are some additional 3rd party options that provide solutions where it’s a native iOS runtime engine, that interprets some kind of high[er] level language for a sort of hybrid type solution, but I don’t have any experience with those.

If you go iOS native, you’re dealing with the Apple submit/review/cost process that introduces complexities, [potential] delays, definitely latency in publishing a new variant of your app.

I’m assuming from your brief description there is a backend service that handles data, authentication, etc.? For that, you’re going to need server side coding (Ruby/Python/[ugh]PHP) and probably some idea about server related tasks like storage/state/DB (though depending on your design/architecture/goals you might be able to only use client side storage[?]).

There are some great [PaaS] services like Heroku that offer a free “development level” (i.e., lower performance, limited records in the DB, etc.), but that easily scale to a fairly low cost service if you need additional resources.