I’m a fan of HTML for building mobile apps. Its incredibly quick and easy to build simple apps. I already know HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Lots of other developers do too, so it’s easier to find people to work with than native platforms.

When I recently started working on a mobile project, I used Codiqa to build a mockup of the app interface and generate HTML and Trigger.io and TestFlight to turn that mock into an app running on my iPhone.

Get Creative With Your Mock

Codiqa makes it easy to create app mocks.

1. Sign up for Codiqa basic account so you can build more than 3 pages and export your mock as HTML
2. Build an awesome mock by dragging and dropping
3. Optional: customise your app by creating a theme with jQuery Mobile Themeroller and uploading it to Codiqa
4. Download your mock as HTML and unzip

From Mock To Mobile In Minutes

Next, I used Trigger.io to create an app from the mock HTML and TestFlight to release it to my phone.

1. Install Trigger.io’s tools
2. Create a directory for your new app
3. Run forge create (See Trigger.io’s OS-specific instructions for more detail)
4. Replace the contents of the src dir Download HTML from Codiqa to the src dir of your new app
5. Rename app.html to index.html so that Trigger knows it’s your start page
6. Change your app’s config to include your package name and point to your provisioning profile (there’s an example local_config.json here)
7. Run forge build ios to compile the app
8. Run forge package ios to generate an IPA package file for iPhones

Distribute Your Mock App

Once you’ve followed these steps, you can upload your build to TestFlight and push it out to your testers.

To deploy apps to iPhones, you will need an Apple developer account and a provisioning profile. TestFlight have a good resource on preparing a build for distribution through TestFlight. Also, Handshake have a good overview of Testing iOS Apps with TestFlight.

Apple’s document About iOS Development Team Administration provides a wealth of info on the iOS development workflow.