Ludovic Frank

August 23, 2025

Actually, their app is hybrid… 😮

I love 37signals, I’ve been talking about them for years! To me, they’re a model company…
In 2021, with just 34 employees, they generated $35 million in revenue (I don’t have reliable data on net profit).

Also:
37signals uses a super lightweight structure, favoring two-person teams (one programmer and one designer) for each project cycle.

That’s less the case today since the company has grown, but back in the day, they achieved a lot with very limited resources. And that’s exactly why—compared to the Googles, Facebooks, and other Big Tech giants—they grab my attention way more.

And I’ve always wondered:
“How the hell do they do it?”

When you use React and all that stuff, you need full dev teams just to maintain that mess.
They, with just a handful of people, manage to deliver a really nice user experience!

And that’s when I discovered things like Hotwire.
Being a fan of the company, of course I use their products (it helps me understand how they do things).

When Hey Mail launched, the CTO, DHH, said the app was native on Android and iOS…
(This was during a dispute with Apple’s App Store, which had blocked them. For a product like that, not being on the App Store is basically a death sentence.)

(Originally in this article, I was talking about pinch-to-zoom, but pinch-to-zoom can also work on native interfaces.)

The app is hybrid.
They didn’t rewrite major parts of the app in SwiftUI; they load web content (and send cookies to the server).

I knew Hotwire Native existed, but the issue is, you have to be on Turbo/Stimulus on the monolith side for it to work…

But if you use a WKWebView (the WebView on iOS) and load server content in it for certain interfaces, it can work just fine 😮
and drastically reduce development time: just use react-native-webview, and boom!

On this Saturday morning, they’ve just pointed me to a potential solution for a problem that’s been on my mind for three days.

Their weakness?
They’re too damn good. 🤣

About Ludovic Frank

Passionate web developer living in France, creator of projects like ViteUneTable, LFNY, LFQR, LFMDP LFUnminfy, LFColors, LFSocial, LFMaps and LFGitignore.

Always interested in trying out new things.

In addition to occasionally writing on this platform, I also maintain my own blog.