What each AI app builder actually outputs

For a lot of apps it genuinely is not. If you are validating an idea, an Expo app will get you to the App Store and real users will not notice or care. React Native is a serious framework with serious apps shipped on it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The stack starts to matter at three specific moments, and it is worth knowing whether any of them are in your future before you pick a tool.

When you need a platform capability the framework has not wrapped yet. Every cross-platform framework sits behind the platform it targets. Usually the gap is months and irrelevant. Occasionally the thing you need is the thing that is missing, and then you are writing a native module by hand — in which case you are doing native development anyway, just through a layer.

When someone else has to work on it. A native Swift project can be handed to any iOS developer. An Expo project can be handed to any React Native developer. Neither is harder to hire for in the abstract, but they are different hires, and the pool for one of them is much larger if your app is your company.

When you want to leave. This is the one that actually bites. Ask what happens to your project if you stop paying — whether you get the source, whether it builds without the vendor’s runtime, whether their SDK is threaded through your business logic. Several tools in the table above export a complete project you can open and build with nothing installed but the platform toolchain. Several do not. That difference is invisible on the day you sign up and total on the day you leave.

Modaal generates native Swift and SwiftUI for iOS and native Kotlin and Compose for Android, as two real projects on your own disk. It runs on the AI agent you already pay for — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini and nine others — with no per-token charge on top, and it works through Xcode rather than around it.

The honest limits, so you do not find them yourself later: it needs a Mac, it needs Xcode, and it assumes you are willing to look at code even if you are not writing it. If that sounds like friction rather than control, one of the browser-based tools above will serve you better and we would rather say so here than waste your afternoon.

What Modaal does that none of the tools above do is keep two native codebases in agreement. Duet shares the application logic across iOS and Android and enforces interface parity with fixtures replayed on both platforms — the build fails when the two disagree. Every other product here either targets one platform, or targets both by rendering through a shared runtime.

Every output description above is quoted from the vendor’s own documentation, with the source linked, and dated. Where a vendor’s docs and marketing pages contradict each other we say so rather than picking the flattering reading.

Four products people ask about are deliberately missing: Choicely, x1, Emergent and OnSpace. Each of them describes its output in marketing terms we could not confirm against their own technical documentation. We would rather leave a gap than fill it with a guess, and we will add them the moment they publish something checkable.

This page gets re-verified before every republish. If you find something here that is out of date, tell us — the correction is more useful to us than the claim was.