From Five Hours Per App to Zero Touch

Background

webtoapp.design turns websites into native Android and iOS apps. Over six years, we've published more than 800 apps to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Most customers are non-technical: small business owners, online shop operators, creators. All with the same goal: a real app in the app stores. Something to download. Something official.

But the app stores were never designed for these people. They were built for mobile developers.

The Problem

Customers tripped up at every stage. They didn't know where to sign up. They entered wrong information. They skipped steps. They accidentally undid completed steps days later.

A single app release often required five hours of email support. The same problems came up 90% of the time. Many customers churned because the process was too frustrating.

At some point, our "done for you" service took barely more time than guiding a self-service customer. Hiring support staff would have been the obvious solution. But we wanted to stay lean, and hiring wouldn't fix the underlying problem. Only a self-service process that actually worked would make the business scalable.

What Didn't Work

We wrote guides, reused email templates, added screenshots. Customers still got stuck. Many didn't read the guides. Others followed them but made mistakes that were hard to trace later.

We looked for existing solutions. We found nothing. The market assumed app publishing was a developer's job.

As long as significant manual support was required, we would never truly scale. The goal had to be full automation.

What We Built

At first, we assisted customers manually. Then we bolted automations onto the existing process. It helped, but we were still not in control of the process.

The real shift came when we built a system that covers the entire journey. Every app, every customer, every step - tracked and guided by the platform. The most error-prone steps are fully automated. The rest are structured, validated, and guided.

The process lives inside the system now. We finally had full visibility and control.

The Turning Point

The system evolved over years. Every few weeks, a new edge case appeared. Each one became part of the system.

Then, around one and a half years ago, an automated email arrived: an app had been published. The name was unfamiliar. There had been no support emails, no questions, no intervention. A customer had completed the entire process alone.

It kept happening. What used to be rare became the norm.

Results

Before, a single app could require five hours of support. Now, most apps are published without intervention. What used to take days now happens in a single session. Total daily support time dropped to less than three hours - including onboarding and maintaining over 800 live apps. Before, that wouldn't have been enough for publishing a single new app. And with most problems solved automatically, the support we do provide is faster and more effective. Customers notice.

And customers who complete publishing stay. The difference in retention is dramatic.

Lessons Learned

Building this system came at a cost. For years, development effort went into publishing infrastructure instead of our core product.

But it enabled something else. Because publishing required almost no manual effort, we could price far below competitors who relied on support staff. We attracted customers they couldn't afford to serve - and they were still profitable for us.

When we looked at the market again recently, we found the same gap. There is still no solution that really supports companies which offer app publishing to their customers.

That's why we decided to take what we built and offer it to others.

Introducing ReleaseRoute

Any platform offering app creation to their users faces similar challenges: publishing is too complex for non-technical users, and supporting them manually doesn't scale.

ReleaseRoute solves this. It integrates into your platform via API. Your users walk through the process in your interface, under your branding. Behind the scenes, ReleaseRoute handles the complexity: guiding users step by step, automating what can be automated, surfacing problems before they become support requests.

And publishing is just the start. ReleaseRoute covers the entire lifecycle - from first submission to ongoing maintenance, whether your users do it themselves or your team handles it for them.

We manage the complexity. Your customers get their apps in the stores - and keep them there.