This case study isn't hypothetical. The app we took from prototype to the App Store is ReactView — a real, live video-analysis platform for coaches and athletes.
ReactView turns raw game footage into clear, teachable insight. Coaches and athletes upload film, tag plays, draw directly on the screen, and share clips in seconds. Its AI-assisted analysis surfaces key moments, recurring patterns, and decision-making tendencies — so coaches spend more time teaching and less time hunting through footage.
Get game footage into one place.
Mark plays and key moments for instant recall.
Draw directly on the frame to show, not tell.
Attach spoken coaching to any clip.
Send clips to a player or the whole team.
Surface patterns and decision-making tendencies automatically.
ReactView is exactly the kind of interaction-heavy product that earns a native mobile app. Video, on-frame drawing, gestures, quick capture, instant sharing — a responsive web page can only approximate those. On a phone, in a coach's hand at the rink, it needs to feel native.
Our definition of done for this build was concrete and testable:
A genuine Flutter rewrite — rebuilt in Dart and compiled to native code, not a WebView wrapper or the React bundle repackaged.
Installs on a real iPhone via TestFlight — not a simulator.
Boots & behaves native — real navigation, a real splash screen, a real app icon.
Authenticates against Supabase on-device, with sessions that persist and a deep-link redirect that returns into the app.
Submitted to App Store review — the real gate, not a private link.
Shipped through GitHub, PR-based — every change reviewed, attributable, and reproducible.
The deliverable isn't just an app — it's a path anyone can walk again.
Proof it's real, not a render
Everyone commits code; roles are hats, not silos, and they rotate at each phase boundary so no single person becomes the only one who understands the machine.
The first real move is getting your React app out of Lovable and into a single GitHub repository — the one source of truth for both apps: your existing web/desktop app and the new Flutter mobile app, under one roof, one history, one set of pull requests.
Owned by the Release Captain, crew committing in parallel.
We don't guess at the architecture; we run a quick bake-off on the Flutter setup — navigation and state management — and ship the winner. The Native Engineer scaffolds navigation, splash, app icon, and the native capabilities that clear Guideline 4.2 (Minimum Functionality).
Owned by the Native Engineer — app config, native shell.
Your Lovable prototype is React; Flutter runs on Dart — there's no copy-paste path, and we don't fake one. We rebuild from the ground up in Dart — every screen fresh as native Flutter, using your prototype as the reference. What we reuse is the only thing worth reusing: your Supabase backend — schema, auth, rules.
The payoff compounds: one Dart codebase compiles to iOS and Android natively. In parallel, Backend/Auth makes Supabase auth behave on a device — deep-link redirects, secure session persistence, and an RLS sanity pass.
Owned by the Shared-Core Dev and Backend/Auth.
iOS builds need macOS — but nobody needs a Mac on their desk. A cloud macOS runner handles signing and produces the archive, so a developer on any OS can trigger a build from a clean checkout and get the same signed artifact. Signing credentials live with the Release Captain, never passed around in DMs.
Owned by the Release Captain — App Store Connect, the build pipeline.
The signed build goes to TestFlight and onto physical iPhones. QA runs a device test matrix through the GitHub Actions gate, triages anything that surfaces, and distributes to testers. This is the moment the app stops being a plan and becomes a thing you can hold.
Owned by QA/DevOps — CI, TestFlight, issues.
Growth/Design closes it out: app icon, screenshots, store copy, and the App Store privacy labels, then packages the launch kit and writes up THE-PATH.md — the playbook so the next build starts from a known-good route. Submitted to review. Same day.
Owned by Growth/Design — launch kit, the recipe.
01 ORIGIN → 02 SYNC → 03 SHELL → 04 BUILD → 05 BETA → 06 SHIP
Same gate, same rigor — a fraction of the calendar.
A responsive layout asks: how do we make the desktop design fit a smaller screen? A native app asks a better question: what does this feature want to be on a phone, in one hand?
Thumb-reachable bottom tabs and native gestures — swipe, pull-to-refresh, edge-swipe back.
Sized for fingers, not cursors — the primary action where your thumb rests.
iOS sheets, native pickers, haptics, and safe-area handling around the notch.
Loading, offline, and error handling built for flaky mobile networks.
Native frame rates, not best-effort CSS transitions.
Your desktop app keeps its responsive web UI and its audience. The mobile app gets an interface designed for how people actually hold and tap a phone. Same product, two front doors — each one right for its screen.
A small crew of experienced engineers, each wearing a hat — and rotating those hats each round so knowledge never gets trapped in one head.
owns main, the pipeline, credentials
owns app config, native shell
owns the shared Dart layer
owns auth, deep links, RLS
owns CI, TestFlight, issues
owns launch kit, the recipe
AI is in the room the whole time, but on a leash. It accelerates the mechanical work — scaffolding, boilerplate, test matrices, first-draft store copy — while every consequential decision is made and reviewed by a person. Nothing reaches main without a human PR review. AI for velocity, humans for judgment.
Speed only counts if the thing that ships actually works. Nothing reaches main — and nothing reaches a tester — without clearing a layered gate built into the pipeline.
No secrets in the repo. Signing keys and Supabase creds live in encrypted secret stores — never in source, never in chat.
Least privilege. Store and signing credentials held by the Release Captain, granted deliberately, fully auditable.
Auth done right on-device. Tokens in the platform secure store, PKCE-style redirect flow, validated deep links.
Data boundaries enforced. Supabase RLS sanity-checked from the mobile client so users only reach their own data.
App Store rejections are predictable — so we design for them up front. Cleared before submission:
Installable on a physical iPhone and submitted to App Store review — booting, authenticating, behaving native.
THE-PATH.md — clone → configure → cloud-build → ship. Your team can run this again without us.
Icon, device-framed screenshots, store listing copy and keywords, privacy labels, and a short demo — everything day one needs.