What Spree teams actually need to know
An app channel for Spree Commerce brands, without the storefront rebuild
The question is not whether a mobile app makes sense for the Spree storefront you have already built. It is how to launch one without rebuilding the custom storefront you have spent years investing in.
Push reaches customers where email and search cannot
Email open rates have fallen for years, and the promotions folder eats a large share of what does get delivered. SMS works but carries TCPA-style compliance overhead, costs that scale with volume, and a customer-experience cap before opt-outs climb. The retention-channel ceiling for Spree merchants, B2B portals, and marketplace operators on Rails sits well below where it used to.
Mobile apps change the shape of the channel. An icon on the home screen, persistent login, push notifications direct to the lock screen, and the install itself as a signal of your best buyers and repeat accounts. Push reaches the customer where email and SMS cannot, and app users are already opted in by definition.
Across the ecommerce category, app users convert at 3-7x mobile web rates, spend 10-50% more per order, and deliver roughly 3x the lifetime value. For B2B and Spree-based commerce teams, the same pattern holds across the MobiLoud roster (Pharmazone, Sleefs, XCVI, JF Petroleum on WooCommerce): that have already done the work of getting catalog, pricing, promotions, and checkout right on the storefront: the app captures the repeat behavior the site has earned.
Every other path rebuilds your storefront from scratch
The other routes to a Spree mobile app all ask the same thing: rebuild your storefront in a separate codebase. Custom native (Swift, Kotlin, React Native) means turning your Spree storefront into an API and replicating every product page, every collection, every promotion rule, every decorator, every deface override, every Rails controller, every Spree extension, and every Storefront API call your team has wired in, all in a different language and on a different release cycle. The team then carries the duplicated work going forward: every catalog change, pricing rule, B2B account flow, marketplace logic, and checkout tweak ships twice.
The cost is real (custom-native runs $500K-$1M+/year fully loaded for an enterprise-scale Spree rebuild), but the deeper problem is the duplication itself. You are not paying for a mobile app; you are paying to maintain a second version of your Spree storefront, separate from the first one, with a different language and a different team. Spree's own position on mobile is essentially "use our APIs to build whatever frontend you want", consistent with the framework's philosophy, but it leaves the duplication problem unsolved.
Your stack stays the source; our team owns the iOS and Android side
MobiLoud is the combination of a native platform and a service team. The platform bridges your live Spree storefront to an iOS and Android app and brings the features a native app needs built in: push notifications via OneSignal callable from any Rails job or scheduled task, deep links into any Spree route, persistent session login, native navigation, smart banners, in-app payments, and analytics tied into GA4, Firebase, or your existing tooling. The native integrations you would otherwise build once-per-app are built into the platform once.
Together, your existing Spree storefront plus our platform is a custom mobile app experience, built on the Spree stack you already operate, not a second one you rebuild from scratch. Every Spree extension, every Rails controller, every ActiveRecord model, every decorator, every deface override, every promotion rule, every Storefront API call, and every Spree 4 or Spree 5 frontend customization that ships on the site shows up in the app automatically. Auth runs through your existing session and middleware. Payments run through whatever processor you have wired in. The same routes serve the app and the browser.
The same hybrid pattern is how Basecamp, built by the team that created Rails, ships its mobile apps, a precedent your engineering team will recognize. Your Rails engineers build for the app the way they build for the storefront: Ruby, Rails, Spree, the gems and extensions they already use, on the release cycle they already run. Our team guides on the app-specific patterns and applies direct customizations to the app experience when something needs to look or behave differently in the app. The native SDK integrations that come up infrequently (custom payments, native analytics, a third-party tool that needs a native bridge) we handle from our side, and we run the iOS and Android operational track: builds and submissions under your developer accounts, OS update cycles, certificate renewals, SDK rebuild deadlines every quarter, and store policy.
"I was able to spin up an app in two months. We weren't limited by the app builder."
Brent Stimmel, VP of IT at JF Petroleum Group, on launching their WooCommerce mobile app on MobiLoud.
After launch is where the channel actually compounds
We are focused on the results we see Spree and ecommerce customers achieve regularly. The launch playbook is where we start: install prompts on your storefront, smart banners on mobile web, QR codes, email and in-app announcements to your existing customer or buyer base, and an app-user incentive to drive the first wave of installs. The push strategy gets built into the integration we set up (abandoned cart, reorder prompts, back-in-stock, account-level promotional campaigns), running directly out of OneSignal and callable from any Rails job or scheduled task.
On Enterprise, the work continues past setup. Your customer success manager runs monthly performance checkpoints against peer Spree and ecommerce brands, builds analytics dashboards on the app channel, reviews what is working in the category, and proposes what to try next. Included monthly development time covers app-side tweaks, custom platform integrations, and direct support for your Rails team when something needs an app-side fix. The push strategy gets refined as the channel grows.
MobiLoud has served 2,000+ brands. The pattern above is what the channel delivers when it is launched and run properly. The fastest way to know whether it works for your Spree storefront is the free preview: we build a working version of your Spree mobile app from your live storefront in roughly 5 to 7 working days, so you can see exactly how it looks and feels before you commit to anything.