I built a tool that clones a phone app from screenshots into React Native
A few weeks ago I wanted to clone an app. Not a website, an actual phone app. And I realized pretty fast that it is a completely different problem, and nobody had a good answer for it.
Here is the thing. Cloning a website is basically a solved party trick now. You open the dev tools and the whole DOM is right there, the CSS, the fonts, the asset URLs. A model reads all of that and spits out a copy. There are tools that do it really well.
A phone app gives you none of that. No markup to read, no stylesheet to copy. You get pixels. That is it. So every website-cloner trick is useless the second you point it at an iOS or Android app.
So I asked myself what I can always get from any app. The answer is kind of dumb but it is the whole idea: screenshots. You can always screenshot an app. No jailbreak, no decompiling, no SDK. A screenshot of an iPhone app and a screenshot of an Android app are the same thing to me, an image.
