How long did your first mobile app take, from idea to install?

TL;DR

• The screens are rarely the slow part of shipping a first mobile app
• Auth, backend, push notifications, builds/signing and store review eat the time
• I'd love to hear how long yours took and what you'd do differently

Something I keep noticing in mobile dev threads: nobody complains that the screens took forever.

It's everything around them. Setting up auth. Wiring a backend. Getting push notifications working on both iOS and Android. Figuring out EAS builds, certificates and signing. Then waiting on the first App Store review, and finding out that fixing a typo means another one (unless you've set up OTA updates).

Where RapidNative fits

Full disclosure: I work on RapidNative, so this stretch is literally what we work on. You describe the app in plain English and it generates a real React Native + Expo project: screens, Expo Router navigation, NativeWind styling and a Supabase backend. You can export the code any time and keep building it like any other Expo app.

It handles the "blank project to working screens" part. It doesn't make App Store review any faster, and you still own your builds and signing. That's partly why I'm asking: I want to know which of the remaining steps hurt the most for other devs.

A few questions

1. How long did your first mobile app take, from npx create-expo-app (or whatever you started with) to something real users could install?
2. What ate the most time that you didn't expect?
3. Did you start from a boilerplate, a no-code tool, an AI builder, or from scratch? Would you pick the same again?

Drop your honest timeline in the comments, especially the ones that took way longer than planned. 👇