Your app on your phone in the first minute

On the opointo homepage you can now pick a kind of app, type its name, choose a colour and scan a QR code. About 15 seconds later the app is open full screen on your phone: your name on the opening screen, a tab bar, screens you can tap through. No account, nothing to install. Here is what changed, and why.

1. We watched our own first minute, and it never landed

On 2 October we walked through opointo as a newcomer would, on a laptop and on a phone, and timed every step. One click on the homepage gave a whole wired app in half a second. Then it fell apart. The picker promised a polished app with photos, and the canvas showed grey sketches with crossed-out picture boxes. A four-step tour covered the first screen. Naming the app and changing its colour, the first two things anyone tries, changed nothing you could see. The best moment, tapping through your app in the preview, was one button away with nothing pointing to it.

The lesson is old: Google’s homepage has been the search box itself from the start, not a page about searching. The first thing you touch should be the result, already yours.

2. The homepage now puts your app on your phone

Pick one of ten kinds of app on the homepage, such as a booking app, an ordering app or a field service app, each now with its own page. Type its name and choose a colour, and the two phone pictures beside them become your app. Scan the QR code and it opens full screen in your phone’s browser, in your phone’s own light or dark: the iOS design on an iPhone, Material 3 Expressive on Android.

It is a preview drawn by the browser, and its bar says so: “Preview: the real app is native.” The real app comes later, built by your coding agent (the AI tool that writes code, such as Claude Code or Cursor) from the same screens and arrows. Seeing your design on your phone covers what the preview is and is not.

3. The App Builder now looks like your app

• Make it yours. A card asks for the app’s name and colour first. The name shows at once on the opening screen and as the first tab’s title, which your agent’s code keeps.
• The real look on the canvas. Your colours, sample photos and tab icons instead of grey boxes. The sample photos never reach your code, and the plain wireframe is one click away: Sketch, in the View menu.
• Two hints instead of a four-step tour. One points at Preview, one at Send app to agent.
• A shorter picker, Bookings first, every starter on one screen.
• On a phone, picking a starter opens the preview straight away, with a link to carry on from your computer.

4. Every design can be shown before it is built

In the App Builder’s App menu, Share a link gives you a link and a QR code for your design. Whoever opens it sees it full screen on their phone and can start a free copy of their own, which never changes yours. You can update the link or stop sharing, and a link nobody opens for 30 days ends by itself.

Showing an app to the people it is for, before anyone builds it, is the cheapest test there is. It is also a good start on the twelve testers Google Play asks of a new personal account: people who held the design and asked when they could have it.

5. The code, the price and the stores did not change

Designing, the phone preview and share links are free. Your coding agent still builds the real app as a normal Expo project you own: one codebase for iOS and Android, native on both, working even if you cancel. Generating the code is the subscription. The iPhone build still needs a Mac with Xcode, and the compatibility page has the current version. The stores still charge $99 a year for Apple and $25 once for Google, and take weeks, not seconds: how long from a design to a real app has the timeline.

Open opointo.com on your computer, pick the kind of app closest to yours, type its name, and point your phone at the code.