Hey HN, I’m George and I co-developed VoltBuilder (https://volt.build) with James and Tomo. VoltBuilder is a modern replacement for PhoneGap.
Early in the COVID crisis, I was running out of work and looking for a new project. I saw Adobe was abandoning PhoneGap, a tool used by thousands to convert web apps to Android and iOS native apps. (I’ve been a PhoneGap user for 10 years, so I knew I’d miss it)
I spent a weekend going through the Android, iOS and Cordova documentation to see if it would be possible to replicate what PhoneGap does and give myself and all those users some hope. Reading hundreds of messages on StackOverflow helped me figure out some stuff that is really, seriously not documented anywhere.
By Monday, I had something like a POC working. I checked with my long term collaborators, James and Tomo. They were similarly underworked, so we decided to go ahead with the other 98% of the job to make a working product.
Technologies used include Python, Node, Jekyll, Auth0, Stripe, Cordova, Xcode, Android SDK, Express, Helmet, JWT, Flask, Boto3 and more.
VoltBuilder now has a website, a build engine, queuing and billing. We’ve built the server infrastructure to spin up multiple builds at the same time and are starting to test that.
It’s deployed in beta production. About 50 beta testers have thrown thousands of jobs at it. We’re focusing on building a community to get our first users and gather as much feedback as possible. Pricing is still up in the air, but the pricing page shows where we are heading.
Thank you for reading this far. I would love to get your feedback on VoltBuilder and to answer questions.
Great work! I just wanted to point out that I'm seeing "Plans start at $xx.95/month" on the homepage. Wasn't sure if that's a typo/something you meant to replace.
Early in the COVID crisis, I was running out of work and looking for a new project. I saw Adobe was abandoning PhoneGap, a tool used by thousands to convert web apps to Android and iOS native apps. (I’ve been a PhoneGap user for 10 years, so I knew I’d miss it)
I spent a weekend going through the Android, iOS and Cordova documentation to see if it would be possible to replicate what PhoneGap does and give myself and all those users some hope. Reading hundreds of messages on StackOverflow helped me figure out some stuff that is really, seriously not documented anywhere.
By Monday, I had something like a POC working. I checked with my long term collaborators, James and Tomo. They were similarly underworked, so we decided to go ahead with the other 98% of the job to make a working product.
Technologies used include Python, Node, Jekyll, Auth0, Stripe, Cordova, Xcode, Android SDK, Express, Helmet, JWT, Flask, Boto3 and more.
VoltBuilder now has a website, a build engine, queuing and billing. We’ve built the server infrastructure to spin up multiple builds at the same time and are starting to test that.
It’s deployed in beta production. About 50 beta testers have thrown thousands of jobs at it. We’re focusing on building a community to get our first users and gather as much feedback as possible. Pricing is still up in the air, but the pricing page shows where we are heading.
Thank you for reading this far. I would love to get your feedback on VoltBuilder and to answer questions.