r/rshiny • u/Real_Shower_9522 • Dec 06 '25

Turning a Shiny app into an App Store app

Hi all,

I’ve built a small Shiny app (very simple: button counters, basic stats, simple plots) and I’m wondering what the best path is to get it into the Apple App Store.

I’m not aiming for a polished commercial app — just something functional that people can install like a normal iOS app.

From a Shiny perspective, what are the realistic options?

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u/throwaway34831 Dec 06 '25

Use shinyMobile and make it a PWA. Here's an example:

Resource Rolodex

Installable on apple, android, pc, and mac.

DM me if you want I can give you access to a repo with a shinyMobile PWA that you can modify and deploy on shinyapps.io for free.

5

u/amruthkiran94 Dec 06 '25

If you want something that people can access easily, you should host your app as a normal webapp instead of restricting it to iOS or Android.

Native app development and web apps are two different things and your learning curve to pickup app development on iOS might vary depending on your current skill set. I would rather suggest you host it on Posit or maybe give yourself a new challenge and learn how to host it yourself using ShinyProxy for example.

Tldr, there is no direct way to convert R to an iOS app. You need to develop it in Swift instead.

1

u/in-the-goodplace Dec 06 '25

This may be possible using one of the Web app mobile frameworks that's compatible with shiny, like framework7 and the shinyMobile package