NativePHP v3: Build Mobile Apps with Laravel (App Demo)

Hello guys, today we will talk about native PHP for mobile which is now free from February. This is the announcement and I decided to hurry up and create a course about it on Laravel Daily. So here it is in the list of courses. The new native PHP version 3 for mobile apps. So in this video I will publish two of those videos from this course for you to demonstrate how easy it is to start mobile apps with Laravel. So the team of native PHP made it easier to start both from technical point of view and from financial point of view. I'm not affiliated with them. I don't get paid for this course but I'm genuinely impressed. So in this free video on YouTube, I'll publish first two lessons kind of the demonstration and the main things that you need to know and the full course which is still short 41 minutes and eight lessons kind of in my style of exactly main things that you need to know because I think in 2026 no one has time to watch like 3 4 hour courses. So yeah the main parts and if you have any more questions about native PHP we can discuss in the comments and then I may shoot future videos. So let's dive in how easy it is to start creating mobile apps with PHP and Laravel. Let's start this course from demonstration. So here on the screen you can see Laravel and Livewire application. It may be just Laravel. Livewire is not needed. It was just my personal choice and we can transform this into mobile app. And the main thing you need to take care of before native PHP is to have your website your web project responsive with mobile view. So if I do this in my browser, this is how the application would look on mobile. And here's that project in VS Code. And as you can see, there's nothing about native PHP yet. It's a typical Laravel project with LiveWire 4 without any starter kits and with mobile tailwind powered design. So now I will install native PHP into that Laravel application and so that you would understand how it all works in the introduction in their docs. Basically this is the thing that you need to know. So basically native PHP compiles your Laravel project into ondevice mobile code. So Laravel is running on your mobile device. And in version three of native PHP mobile they changed the pricing structure. It used to be expensive to start or not free to start. Now it is free. This is the announcement on February 1st. You can read it in full. By the way, I'm not affiliated with them and I don't get paid for this course, but they genuinely made it easier to start. Not only from financial perspective, but also from technical side. If we go to quick start in the documentation, it used to be the thing that you need to have either Xcode or Android Studio basically be a mobile developer already to compile that thing into mobile code. Not anymore. So this is the thing that appeared in version three and I will demonstrate it to you in a minute. Instead of downloading those other IDEs if you are just a Laravel developer and you don't have experience or willingness to try those Xcode and Android you still can. So you still can go through environment setup. iOS requirement Xcode and Apple and Android more details or you can just do this jump. Jump is a mobile application for Android and iOS and I will show you my Android device. But first we need to run composer require. So in the terminal I run composer require native PHP mobile version three. All success. Let's clear. And now if we run PHP out is a native jump. So no configuration required at all. We just run this and we select the target platform. In this case, I will show my Android Samsung Galaxy S20 with Android 13 version, which is ironically the latest version that I can download on my a bit older phone. But this is also the earliest version that native PHP supports. So it's building the assets for Android. Let me put it up. So it's creating a zip archive and then it opens the browser with QR code that I should scan from my mobile device and then the application would run on my Android. Let me show you. So on my Android phone here I have the application called Jump which I downloaded from Play Store of Android. And then if I launch Jump which I will do right now I already have one project listed as you can see. And the important part to launch the application on mobile is that mobile needs to be on the same Wi-Fi network as my computer, my laptop in this case, otherwise it would not connect. But I am on the same Wi-Fi. And all I need to do to scan this QR code, I need to click this plus here. And then it will open the screen to scan that QR code, which I will do right now. And now look what happens. It's downloading the bundle. It's trying to compile. And then in a few seconds we should see yes we do see our mobile application. So Laravel application on my Android device which basically has PHP and Laravel inside on my phone. So now we can click around. These are buttons that are actually working. We can browse movies and go for quiz. This is the actual application which I will show you with many more details inside this course. But what I wanted to show you now in this first lesson is how easy it is to start. So nothing to download in terms of Xcode or Android Studio or something. Nothing extra to configure except for composer require and then PHP artisan native jump and nothing to pay for in the beginning at least. There are paid plugins and there are things that you may want to pay for and we'll talk about that later in this course. But to start it's very very easy in native PHP mobile version 3. In this lesson we will take a look at the basic core code of this Laravel application to emphasize two things database structure and database setup and also mobile view for visual look. So first the database this is a quiz app with questions and the database of questions is locally on device as well and native PHP by default supports SQLite which is also on device. So by default this application can be local only without any network without any external databases. We will talk about possibility of external databases and APIs later in this course, but for now the most simple option is to have that data locally. Here's the explanation from the official documentation. Native PHP supports SQLite and then you configure your Laravel project for SQLite. And this is the main thing. Each time your app starts, you will automatically have your migrations executed. And the key is migrations, not cedars. So later in the docs it is explained that you should add the data like this in the migration not in the cedars and this is the example in my code. So here's a config for database by default it is SQLite and didn't change it inv. Then we have typical migrations for Laravel application. So users cache and jobs tables that come from default Laravel installation and then the structure of all the other database table for quizzes. But then one of the migrations is seed quiz data. So this is that migration file and we have private functions to seed various tables. So age groups, movies and questions and then the actual data may come from elsewhere. For example, you can place that in JSON structure on the same device in the same Laravel project. So you can see that here in database data a lot of JSON files for various movies questions and more details for that application. So basically this is how you prepare the data to be seated or migrated technically to your mobile device in local SQLite. And of course with that you need to use SQLite syntax but Laravel supports SQLite by default so there shouldn't be much trouble with that. And one of the most typical questions I see online from people who want to try native PHP is this. Why SQLite and not MySQL, posgress or other database. This is a deliberate security decision to prevent developers from accidentally having database credentials. You can read more in detail about databases in the official documentation. Now let's move to the other parts of the application. As I mentioned in previous video, this is a laravel and livewire application. And for dynamic behavior, I chose livewire and with version 4, this is how the routes look. So each page is actually a livewire component, single page component. So for example, if we go to homepage, it opens this with flash emoji prefix. And this is a single file livewire component, which means this logic of kind of controller and then blade down below is in the same file. But as I mentioned, it doesn't have to be this way. You can have Laravel controller and blade. But in this case, for dynamic behavior, I chose my favorites Livewire and also Alpine here for X data. But the main point that I want to emphasize here is the preparation for mobile. For example, min screen and also that homepage blade by default extends the app blade layout. So here you can see minage screen as well. Also important part is the viewport here with scales and then in various parts of HTML with tailwind you may see things like minh56 pixels. Also important part is w full for buttons to take the whole space. Also you may see generous padding of x6 and y5 with tailwind for this button. And in this case we're talking about those buttons here on the left. They take full width as you can see exactly like expected on mobile screen and there are more things in Tailwind for mobile designs and various elements but I don't want it to be tailwind course it's about native PHP more but basically you need to understand that your goal is to prepare your website to be mobile friendly with all the elements accordingly. So yeah, I would say that these two things are the most important for your website to be mobile friendly. Database structure and migrations for local data and mobile views. Just from these things alone, you may publish your native PHP mobile application without any paid plugins or any extra features. If your app is simple,