Webflow to iPhone app
Turn your Webflow site into a real iPhone app
Borel turns a Webflow site into a native iPhone app. Paste your site's address, and Borel reads your brand, your collections and your words, photographs the home page and builds an app in Swift and SwiftUI around them. It isn't your site in a frame: it's an app with tabs, saved favourites and accounts, which you try on a live iPhone and publish to the App Store.
Updated
Native apps built by Borel, in the iOS Simulator.
Webflow
What does Webflow make?
Webflow is a visual website builder for teams who care how a site looks. You design pages on a canvas, publish them to your own domain, and keep a staging copy at an address like yoursite.webflow.io.
Its CMS holds the content that changes, as Collections and their items: blog posts, team pages, products, locations or case studies.
The iPhone question
Can Webflow make an iPhone app?
Not from the Webflow designer. Native mobile apps sit on Webflow's public wishlist as something customers asked for, and its tools publish websites. On an iPhone, a Webflow site opens in Safari.
Webflow's own AI web-app generator, App Gen, has been paused and is being retired. And a marketing site wrapped as an app tends to run into Apple's guideline 4.2, so the app needs to do something your site doesn't. That's the part Borel adds.
Apple's rule
Why a rebuild beats a wrapper
Apple reviews every app before it reaches the App Store, and a website in an app's frame is what its guideline 4.2 is about.
“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.”
Borel never wraps your Webflow site. It writes a separate app in Swift with SwiftUI, Apple’s own language and interface framework, so the screens, scrolling and controls are the iPhone’s.
Step by step
How to turn your Webflow site into an iPhone app
- 1
Copy your live site's address
Your custom domain or the webflow.io staging link, written out in full with https://. Borel reads it like a visitor would.
- 2
Say what the app should add
Send the prompt below and fill in what visitors could do in an app: save items, book, keep a list, get answers. Screenshots of other pages help, four per message.
- 3
Your design, as a native app
Borel photographs the home page at desktop and phone size, takes your fonts, colours and logo, and turns Collections into native lists with detail screens.
- 4
Preview it on a real iPhone
The app runs in Apple's iOS Simulator inside your browser, free. Borel Companion, on Pro, sets it up on your own phone for a walk-around test.
- 5
List it on the App Store
Pro plus an Apple Developer membership lets Borel build, sign and upload the app to App Store Connect, under your company's name.
Your first message
A prompt to start from
Put your address where it says, fill in the brackets, and send it as your first message.
Make a native iPhone app for my Webflow site at <your address>. Use its fonts, colours, logo and wording. Turn [Collection name] into a list people can browse and save, add accounts with email, and put [what the app adds] on its own tab.
Moving over
What moves over, and what is made new
Borel works from what your app shows, the screenshots you add and the words you write. It doesn't copy code or accounts out of another platform.
| In your Webflow site | In the iPhone app |
|---|---|
| Visual design | Moves over. Colours, fonts (matched to iPhone type), logo and the home page's mood. |
| CMS Collections | Moves over. The items Borel can read on public pages become the app's starting content; paste in the rest. |
| Page copy | Moves over. Headlines and text in the site's own language. |
| Interactions and animations | Made new. Replaced by the iPhone's own motion, from SwiftUI's transitions and sheets. |
| New in the app | Made new. Accounts, saved favourites and the features you ask for, in Borel's cloud. |
| Forms and site search | Made new. Rebuilt as native screens if the app needs them. |
| Your Webflow site | Stays. Published and edited in Webflow as always. |
Frequently asked questions
No. The app is a separate SwiftUI app with its own content in Borel's cloud. Borel reads your site when you ask, so after a big site change you can ask it to read the site again and update the app.
Apple wants apps to be more than a repackaged website. Give the app a job beyond the site, like saving favourites, a member area or a tool your customers use, and Borel builds it natively.
Borel matches each web font to the closest iPhone system type, serif, rounded, mono or the standard San Francisco, so the app reads like your brand.
No. Borel only needs the public address. It never signs in to Webflow or reads your project files.
You do. It's published under your own Apple developer account, and you can download the Swift code from Borel at any time.
Paste your Webflow site
See what your brand looks like as a native iPhone app.