When I went on-stage at Laracon EU back in February, I was extremely nervous, but I was also incredibly excited to share my work on making PHP work on iOS.
I could never have dreamed how far — or how quickly — we'd progress the project during 2025!
I genuinely thought it would just be me, with some of the NativePHP core contributors, steadily working on making it better as a side project.
Little did I know what a rocket ship it would become!
#Fast-forward
Just a little over a month after Laracon, Shane came to me and said he'd got Android working and together we formed Bifrost Technology.
We shaped up v1 and launched it May 2nd to massive acclaim.
Over the intervening months, we built Bifrost (the build service), fixed countless bugs in v1, and kept on making the whole thing better.
We gave dozens of talks in-person and online across the Laravel and PHP community, showing the world what's possible when you run PHP on a phone.
We released Bifrost, gave away 1,000 NativePHP licenses, crossed 10,000 downloads and now have over 2,500 customers!
You don't need to tell me twice that this is the signal to go all-in!
We're both full-time in the kitchen now and I can only pop my head through the hatch to say that the energy in here is electric! ⚡️
#Unstoppable
Yesterday, we launched v2. Just over 6 months since we released v1. And less than a year since I first got PHP running on iOS.
I'm extremely proud of this release. We both are! We've literally worked tirelessly to make it the tool that we want to make the kinds of mobile apps we enjoy building and using.
There are so many awesome improvements in this release — the improved DX, more native APIs, the true native UI components! — but for me, our greatest achievement is that there are no breaking changes.
There are deprecations and we'll remove those at some point, but I think it's super important for a project like this to get to stability as quickly as possible.
We've got some stiff competition and they've had a pretty good head start. If we stand any chance at all of being the go-to solution for building mobile apps, we've got to keep our developers happy and with as little pain as possible.
So that's what we're going to do! We've put a lot of thought into our APIs to ensure we don't need to make wild changes any time soon.
#Easy upgrade
For anyone on v1, the upgrade is a simple composer update:
// composer.json{ "require": { "nativephp/mobile": "~1.13.0", "nativephp/mobile": "~2.0.0", }}Then in your terminal, run:
composer updatephp artisan native:install --forceAnd you're done!
#Why v2?
Does this mean we're going to making major version releases willy-nilly? If there are no breaking changes, should this even have been a major release?
All I can say is: look at that changelog! We've added and improved a ton and we've invested hundreds of hours building this. Anything less than a major version release just doesn't do it justice.
But that doesn't mean we'll be doing a major release every 6 months!
We will be stabilizing major releases as much as we can, but we have a lot of dependencies to account for; between PHP, Laravel, iOS, and Android versions, my gut says there will be unavoidable major releases at times and we'll be tied to their release cycles.
But as we've done with v2, we will work incredibly hard to ensure these are as painless as possible for you. We want everyone to be able to upgrade easily to start taking advantage of all the improvements straight away.
#Sustainability
We're so grateful to everyone who has seen the value in what we're building and supported this project directly by purchasing a license and/or Bifrost subscription.
We would not have been able to achieve everything we've done without that support.
And to continue making this whole thing a great platform for building mobile apps, that needs to continue.
You want to build apps that are stable for the long-term and that work reliably. You want upgrades to be easy and straightforward for your developers so that your apps keep working well for your users.
Paid access to NativePHP for Mobile licenses — either via license purchase or through a Bifrost subscription — is still the only way that we can continue providing the level of support that the project needs and that you deserve.
We hear the increasing call for a free version and we have promised to deliver on this just as soon as we've reached a sustainable level of income. We're not there yet, but as soon as we get there, a free version will come.
A big part of reaching sustainability is coming from our Partners.
#Partners
More and more businesses are building apps with NativePHP for their products and for their clients. Many of them are approaching us for deeper support, driving feature development, performance improvements and offering critical feedback to help us shape NativePHP into an awesome tool.
Our Partner program isn't just a sponsorship program — our partners get real value out of having direct access to me and Shane, and we're going over and above to make sure their needs are met so they can keep on building amazing solutions.
We want to especially thank Nexcalia and Web Mavens for their partnership.
If you're in a business that's using or thinking of using NativePHP, we'd love to chat about your needs and work out a mutually beneficial partnership.
#40% Off + Free Licenses
We want everyone to try NativePHP for Mobile. We think it's already the absolute best way to build cross-platform mobile apps, and every day it's only getting better!
The combined tooling of NativePHP and Bifrost is enabling developers all over the world to build and release native apps for iOS and Android at ridiculous speed.
For this Black Friday weekend, you can get 40% off our Hela and Thor Bifrost plans!
That means you could get a year of Bifrost for less than the price of a Max license (Hela annual plan)! And it includes a FREE Max license.
That's a huge saving. Available until end of the day Monday (UTC).
#Let's go!
We're not stopping or even slowing down. v2 is just the next step and there are many more to come on our climb towards making NativePHP the best way to build apps.
Here's a quick insight into our roadmap over the next few months:
- PHP 8.5 support
- Mobile Plugins - build your own native functions that you can call from PHP and share them with the community
- The Jump app - forget installing Xcode/Android Studio, simulators, provisioning profiles and all that junk! Just
laravel newand get it running on your real device in minutes! - Major Bifrost improvements - desktop support, workflows and more
- More native UI components
We're ready for your apps! Are you?
— Simon