OTA, explained: redesign your app without shipping an update

The slowest part of running a mobile app is usually not building it — it’s changing it. A color tweak becomes a rebuild, a store review, and a wait. Then you wait again for users to actually update.

StoreToNative apps work differently: the app is a native renderer for your configuration.

How it works

Every time your app launches, it fetches its current configuration from our servers — theme, layout, content, feature flags — caches it, and renders natively from it. If the network is down, it uses the last cached version; failing that, the configuration baked in at build time. Your app always opens.

Publish a change in the console and it’s simply… the new configuration. Installed apps pick it up on their next launch. No rebuild. No store re-review. No waiting for users to update, because there’s nothing to update — the app they already have renders the new design.

What you can change over the air

• Theme: colors, typography choices, corner styles, card layouts, the storefront preset itself (the Fashion and General presets are a config value).
• Home screen layout: hero banners, category tiles, featured products, promo banners, “For you” — add, remove, and reorder sections.
• Splash animation: six presets, one toggle.
• Onboarding: the intro slides new users see are merchant-authored config.
• Feature switches: things like the review prompt or your WhatsApp number.

That covers nearly everything a store changes seasonally. Black Friday theme on Thursday night, back to normal Monday morning — without touching a build.

What still needs a real build

The honest list. Anything baked into the native shell:

• App name and icon (the launcher versions)
• The bundle id (permanent once you’ve published)
• New native capabilities (a plugin the binary doesn’t contain yet)

For those, you press Build — a signed Android build takes about 7 minutes — and go through the store’s normal update process.

Everything else is a Tuesday-afternoon edit. That’s the point.

Start your 14-day trial — you can redesign your app twice before dinner.