I came across bravo studio, which claims to be able to convert your Figma file into native apps, without writing any code.

I had seen so many different tools and services who claims that they can convert your design file directly into a live product, without having to know how to code. None of them really works out perfectly. But every time I heard a new tool, I still couldn’t help to get excited and hope this time it would be the real game-changer.

Bravo Studio wasn’t.

It does provide some nice concepts like connecting to real data via APIs, and it has a promising roadmap for items like authentication and more components supporting. Its backend solution started with Airtable and now it can connect to any kind of REST APIs. This does sound great — I mean, if you as a designer really understand what is a REST API and how to set it up.

It took me a while to setup a working demo with it but soon I gave it up. It did everything it advertised, but as any other “no coding skills needed” services, it just takes too much effort to configure the project properly. Even when you achieved to do that, there are still too many limitations. As a designer you always want to create “the best user experience” in the world. Unfortunately, all those design-to-code solutions has to been built up from the basic functions — and usually you couldn’t really bear with the basics.

The paradox is that, to create a truly impressive, interactive app or website, you have to be able to think as a programmer. And when you start to think as a programmer, you either start to lose creativity, or it just makes more sense for you to do the code manually — rather than relying on the auto-generated codebase. Even with my favorite service Webflow, sometimes I also felt that it would just be faster for me to export the code and edit on them manually.

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With that saying, Bravo Studio is still a very interesting product. I’d still follow on their future updates to see how far it could go.

I would also go back to their website and the app from time to time, just to have fun watching those sick animations 😂😂😂