Web App vs Native App: The Differences, and How to Turn a Web App Into a Native App

The line is function, not technology. A website mainly presents content you read. A web app does something for you: it holds state, it has accounts, it processes input and returns a result. A restaurant’s menu page is a website. The booking system behind it is a web app. The distinction matters here because it changes what an App Store reviewer sees when your app opens, which is the subject of a later section.

A progressive web app is a web app with three additions: a service worker for caching and offline behaviour, a web app manifest that describes the icon and launch behaviour, and HTTPS. Those turn a browser tab into something a user can add to the home screen, open full screen without browser chrome, and use with no connection.

A PWA is genuinely close to an app for a large class of products, and on Android it is very close indeed. It is covered properly in the PWA section below, because for a meaningful share of readers it is the correct answer and the cheapest one.

Browsers deliberately restrict what a page can reach. No arbitrary background execution, limited or no access to Bluetooth and NFC depending on platform, no native biometric prompt, no place in the app stores, and on iOS a set of push and storage limits that do not apply on Android. You also inherit whatever the browser gives you for navigation, which is why web apps on phones so often feel a step removed from the apps around them.

Your users reach you from a link, an email or a search result. Sessions are occasional rather than daily. You ship frequently and do not want a review queue between you and production. You need one codebase because of team size or budget. Desktop matters as much as mobile, which is true of most business software. Or you are still finding product-market fit and every week spent on two platforms is a week not spent on the product.

People use the product often enough to want an icon. You need push notifications as a core mechanic rather than a nice-to-have, particularly on iOS. You need hardware the browser will not give you: Bluetooth peripherals, NFC, background location, biometric authentication. You need reliable offline use. You are selling through store discovery. Or the experience is performance-critical in the ways described above.

The common pattern is not a choice, it is a sequence. Build the web app first, because it is one codebase, ships immediately and can be validated with real users. Add the native app once you know people return often enough to justify the icon and the push channel. Slack, Notion, Figma and Basecamp all did this in that order.

What changed recently is the cost of the second step. Turning an existing web app into a native app used to mean a rebuild. It no longer has to, which is the rest of this guide.

The default choice for teams with developers. Capacitor is open source and free, and it drops into an existing web app rather than asking you to restructure it: npm install @capacitor/cli @capacitor/core then npx cap init. What you get back is a real native project for each platform, which you own and can extend, plus a plugin ecosystem for camera, geolocation, push, filesystem and the rest.

It is actively developed, with the current core release published in July 2026. Ionic also publishes a migration path from the older Apache Cordova, which is the tool Capacitor effectively succeeded. Strength: full control, no vendor, no monthly fee. Cost: you need someone comfortable in Xcode and Android Studio.

Free, and the fastest route if your web app is already a progressive web app. You give it a URL, it reports what your PWA is missing, and it generates store-ready packages for Google Play, the Microsoft Store and iOS. There is no monthly cost and no lock-in.

Strength: genuinely free, backed by Microsoft, and it improves your PWA on the way through. Limit: it packages a PWA, so if you do not have a service worker and a manifest yet, that is work you do first.

A commercial platform built specifically for this job. Median describes itself as a webview app development platform, ships a large set of native plugins, and states it is used by Fortune 500 web teams. It is rated 4.7 out of 5 on G2.

Strength: mature native feature set without maintaining a native codebase yourself. Limit: a subscription, and you are dependent on the vendor for native capability.

The managed end of the market. MobiLoud does the conversion for you, quoting six to eight weeks, and keeps the app in sync with your site afterwards. It is aimed largely at ecommerce brands, and states predictable pricing with no revenue share.

Strength: nobody on your team has to learn any of this. Limit: the highest cost and the slowest of the five, which is the trade you are deliberately making.

Ours, so treat this paragraph accordingly, and it is listed last on purpose. Appy Pie AI takes your web app URL and produces Android and iOS apps without code, with push notifications and native navigation configured from a dashboard rather than a terminal. It is the cheapest and fastest way to find out whether an app of your product is worth having at all.

Honest limits: there is no source export, so you are not left with a native project you own the way Capacitor leaves you one. It is a wrapper, so the ceiling is the ceiling described above. If your web app needs deep hardware integration or custom native modules, you will outgrow it, and Capacitor is the better answer.

Everything above assumes a web app you built and host yourself. If yours runs on a hosted platform instead, the available routes are narrower and the details differ, so each one has its own walkthrough: WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace and Wix.

App Review Guideline 4.2 is the one that matters, and it is worth reading in Apple’s own words: “Your app should include features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website. If your app is not particularly useful, unique, or ‘app-like,’ it doesn’t belong on the App Store.”

Guideline 4.2.2 is more specific still: apps “shouldn’t primarily be marketing materials, advertisements, web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links.” Note what is not being banned. Wrapping is not prohibited. Wrapping something with nothing app-like about it is.

Guideline 4.2.6 catches people out and almost nobody mentions it: apps created from a commercialised template or app generation service “will be rejected unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app’s content.”

In practice this means the app must be submitted from your own Apple Developer account, in your business name, not your vendor’s. If a converter offers to publish on your behalf under their account, that is the wrong shape and it is a documented rejection reason. Register your own accounts. Our guide to creating an Apple Developer account covers the process.

Google is materially more permissive here, and it is explicit rather than merely lenient. Play’s Device and Network Abuse policy restricts apps from downloading and running interpreted code at runtime, then carves out precisely the case we are discussing: the restriction “does not apply to code that runs in a virtual machine or an interpreter where either provides indirect access to Android APIs (such as JavaScript in a webview or browser).”

That asymmetry explains an experience many teams have: the same wrapped app sails onto Google Play and is rejected by Apple. It is not inconsistency, it is two different rules.

Give the reviewer something to point at that a browser tab cannot do. Push notifications are the strongest single addition. Offline access to previously loaded content is next, and is genuinely useful. Then: native navigation rather than a page that scrolls inside a frame, biometric login, camera or barcode scanning if it fits your product, and home screen or widget integration. Two or three of these move you from a repackaged website to an app with a reason to exist.

Two fixed platform fees apply whichever route you take: the Apple Developer Program is $99 per year and Google Play charges a $25 one-time registration fee. Neither is optional if you want store listings.

Then there is the recurring cost people forget: apps need maintenance even when your product does not change. Both platforms raise minimum SDK requirements, deprecate APIs and change privacy rules on their own schedule, and you have to keep up or your listing eventually stops being accepted. Budget for maintenance, not just for the build. Our guide to the cheapest way to build an app breaks the numbers down further.

The most common and most expensive. A wrapper reproduces your mobile web experience exactly, then attaches your brand to it on a store listing where strangers rate it publicly. Fix the mobile site first.

This is what Guideline 4.2 exists to catch. If the app does precisely what the browser did, expect Apple to say so. Add push, offline or a hardware feature before you submit, not after the rejection email.

Guideline 4.2.6 is explicit that apps from a generation service must be submitted by the content owner. Beyond the compliance issue, an app on someone else’s account is an app you do not fully control. Register your own.

Digital goods and subscriptions consumed in the app generally fall under Apple’s in-app purchase rules and commission. Physical goods do not. Work out which you are before choosing a route, because it can change the business case entirely.