Built with Ruby Native

An existing Rails app, in the App Store in two days

Foxance, built in Rails and live in the App Store.

Ruby Native turns Rails businesses into iOS and Android apps.

Ender Ahmet Yurt is a Rails developer in Turkey, and Foxance is the personal finance tracker he built for himself. It's also the first customer-built Ruby Native app to ship to the App Store.

His path there started with Spendee, the finance app he used for years. When that stopped fitting how he wanted to track his money, he moved everything to an Excel spreadsheet. That worked for a while, but a spreadsheet is not an app.

He built Foxance as a Rails app first, then made it responsive and added a PWA mode so it could feel app-like on his phone. When that still wasn't enough, he tried Hotwire Native and then plain Swift. As he put it: "Both took too long. Ruby Native got me from zero to TestFlight in a day."

Ender had tried Ruby Native once before on a smaller project, but it felt buggy and the documentation was thin, so he dropped it. He came back for Foxance, and the app was in the store within two days.

Read Ender's full account on his blog →

Why Ruby Native

The five approaches Ender tried

Ender weighed five ways to get Foxance onto a phone. Here's how they stacked up, in his framing.

Approach	Pros	Cons
Responsive web	Zero new tooling Same Rails app, same deploy	Not in the App Store No native feel
PWA	Installable on the home screen Works offline if configured	Still not a real App Store listing iOS PWA support is uneven
Hotwire Native	Real native shell over a Rails app Open-source, by 37signals	Swift and Kotlin still required Xcode setup felt heavy
Native Swift + JSON API	Full native feel Total UI control	Rebuild every screen in Swift Two codebases forever
Ruby Native Chosen	YAML configuration, no Swift Cloud builds, no Xcode setup Shipped to App Store in two days	Publishing costs money Not fully native Still maturing as a tool

From Ender's blog post: How I built a Rails app for the App Store without writing Swift.

What Ruby Native made possible

The framework features Ender used

Foxance keeps the native side simple. The whole iOS experience comes from one YAML file.

Native tab bar

The four tabs at the bottom of Foxance are a real UITabBar, configured in YAML and rendered with SF Symbols. Each tab points at a Rails route, and the transactions tab uses eager loading so it's already rendered when Ender taps it.

# config/ruby_native.yml
tabs:
  - path: /dashboard
    icon: house
  - path: /transactions
    icon: list.bullet
    eager: true
  - path: /reports
    icon: chart.bar
  - path: /settings
    icon: gearshape

Cloud builds, no Xcode

Ruby Native runs the iOS build on hosted infrastructure. One click in the Ruby Native dashboard produces a signed binary, ready for TestFlight without certificates to manage or Apple Developer portal clicks.

Automated App Store screenshots

The screenshots in Foxance's App Store listing are rendered automatically from the Rails routes Ender configured, with no Simulator dance or manual capture.

Honest tradeoffs

What Ender would still change

In Ender's own words.

“Publishing to the App Store costs money. Doesn't fully deliver the native feel. Still maturing as a tool.”

Ender Ahmet Yurt

Joe's response

App Store fees are Apple's, not mine to remove. Native feel is exactly where I'm focused right now. Native page transitions are coming to Normal Mode this year, which closes most of the gap Ender is pointing at.

“The app isn't 100% native and I know it. Some people pointed out the design on social media. They're right.”