Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We initially launched Retool on HN five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494. The feedback was extraordinarily helpful then (e.g. we launched source control, on-prem, etc. based on HN comments), and we’re grateful for all of it.

Today, we’re excited to get HN’s thoughts on one of our new products: Retool Mobile. It lets you build and deploy mobile apps in minutes, not days. The idea is there is a large class of line-of-business mobile apps, and the process of getting a simple form + button on a mobile device, in a native app, to POST back to an API endpoint, is startlingly difficult. (As a web developer myself, it has for a while been shocking how hard it is to build and ship something useful onto the app store.)

For us, it was important that we build a native mobile app. That’s because although the web as a platform has come a long way, we think Apple / Google are — to some extent — anti-web, in the sense that they hamstring web developers in an attempt to get more apps on their app stores. With a native app, we were able to ship a brand new set of mobile-specific components, drive substantially more performance, and frankly — deliver much more delight.

The team is currently hard at work on white labeling, offline apps, and push notifications. We expect to ship all that in the next few months.

If you have any feedback on the product, please do comment in this thread! HN is a particularly valuable source of product feedback for us, and the team is very eager to please HN readers. (Since if we can do that, we can surely please any developer, hah!)