Despia vs Base44: Which One Ships Your Mobile App

These two get compared as if they compete, and for about 90% of their surface they do not. Base44 builds the app. Despia ships it to the App Store and Google Play as a real native binary. The overlap is one step, the last one, and that is the only place a comparison means anything.

Are Despia and Base44 competitors?

Only at the final step. Base44 is an AI app builder: you describe what you want, it writes and hosts the app, and it is good at that.

Despia is a native runtime that ships a web app to both stores with device access. The two meet at submission. This matters because the framing decides the question. If you are choosing which tool to build your app in, Despia is not on the list, and neither of us would suggest otherwise. If you have already built in Base44 and you are working out how the mobile app gets made, then there are two paths and they lead to different places.

Most Despia customers use both. That is the normal configuration rather than a compromise.

What is Base44 genuinely good at?

Getting from an idea to a working, hosted web app faster than almost anything else, and getting non-developers all the way there.

The editor, the AI chat, the built-in backend and the one-click publishing are the product, and they are strong. The store submission tooling reflects that too. Base44 scans your app against Apple and Google guidelines, gives you a readiness score, offers AI-generated fixes for what fails, and generates a signed IPA and AAB from inside the editor. For a solo builder who has never opened App Store Connect, that is a real reduction in unfamiliar work.

Base44's documentation is also unusually straight about what the mobile wrapper does and does not do, which is more than most platforms offer.

Where do the two paths diverge?

At what the mobile app is. The Base44 mobile app is documented as a web view that opens your published URL, with push notifications available.

Despia is a native runtime with over 50 device capabilities callable from the same web code, plus full native project export. The practical divergence is not the count. It is which specific capabilities decide whether your app can ship at all.

	Base44 mobile app	Despia
What it is	Web view around your published URL	Native runtime, WKWebView and Chromium WebView
Native features	Push notifications	Over 50, called from one JavaScript function
Digital purchases	No compliant path documented yet	RevenueCat paywalls, purchases, Customer Center
Push	Sent by Base44 via your APNs key and Firebase	Sent by OneSignal, from an account you own
Biometrics	Not supported	Face ID and Touch ID bound to encrypted storage
Persistent storage	Not supported	Survives uninstall and reinstall, syncs per account
Offline	Not supported	Your own service worker, enabled by the runtime
Background audio	Not supported	Native player with lock screen controls
Health data	Not supported	HealthKit and Health Connect
Bundle ID	Generated, not changeable	Chosen by you at project creation
Entry URL	Selected automatically	Any URL you control
Native project export	Not offered	Full Xcode and Android Studio projects
Over-the-air updates	Web layer only	Remote hydration, no resubmission
Where it runs	Base44 hosting	Any host, your domain

Three rows do most of the deciding.

Digital purchases. Base44 documents that Stripe must not be used for digital goods in the mobile app, that both stores require their own billing, and that a StoreKit and Play Billing integration is in progress. If you sell subscriptions, that is not a preference, it is a blocked path.

Bundle ID and entry URL. Both are generated and fixed, which means the app's permanent public identity and the address it loads are decided by the platform. Neither can be renamed later on either store.

Native capability breadth. This is what guideline 4.2 is actually asking about, and an app whose entire native surface is push notifications is the case Apple's standard 4.2 rejection letter names by example.

Why does Despia integrate OneSignal instead of building push?

Because the best version of a notification platform already exists and it is not something a mobile runtime should be trying to rebuild. Despia's principle is narrow: build the runtime, and integrate the category leader for everything else.

The consequence for you is that you onboard to OneSignal directly and own that account. You get segmentation, scheduling with per-user local timezone delivery, Journeys automation, A/B testing, analytics, templates, in-app messages, email and SMS on the same user record, and integrations with the tools you already run. OneSignal has also opened a hosted MCP server on the open protocol, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Copilot can operate the account directly.

The same principle runs through billing. In-app purchases integrate the official RevenueCat SDK rather than a homegrown layer, and SDK versions are maintained and provisioned on every rebuild.

The test of a philosophy like this is whether it holds when you need something unusual, and here it does: the full OneSignal REST API is available to you, so you are never waiting on a wrapper method to be exposed for a field the provider already supports.

Does it matter that Despia only does this?

It matters at the edges, and store submissions fail at the edges. Base44 is an AI builder where the mobile wrapper is one feature among many. Despia's runtime has done nothing but this since 2011.

Both are legitimate positions, and they produce different release cadences. The runtime began as Advanced WebView in 2011 for agency client apps, and over 7,500 apps shipped on it before it became Despia in 2023. That window covers the introduction of guideline 4.2, several rewrites of the review rules, App Tracking Transparency, privacy manifests and two generations of submission tooling on both platforms. Keeping shipped apps compliant through each of those is not a feature you add to a roadmap.

It also sets the cadence. On a general-purpose platform, native capability competes for engineering time with the editor, the AI, the hosting and the billing, and it should, because those are the product. On a specialist runtime it is the product. Base44's documentation says it continues to expand native feature coverage and points to its release notes, and there is no reason to doubt the intent. The question a builder faces is not whether a capability is coming, it is whether it is there on the day you need to ship.

What does using both actually look like?

You build in Base44 exactly as you do now, publish to a domain you own, point a Despia project at it, and add native calls from the same codebase.

Nothing about the Base44 workflow changes, and content updates still publish without a store resubmission.

import despia from 'despia-native'

const isDespia = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().includes('despia')

if (isDespia) {
    // Store the session behind Face ID or Touch ID
    await despia('setvault://?key=sessionToken&value=' + token + '&locked=true')
}

Native calls sit inside the isDespia gate, so the same code runs unchanged in a browser. Global callbacks that the runtime invokes by name are assigned outside it.

What happens if you outgrow Base44?

That depends on decisions made before you shipped rather than on anything you do at the time.

If the identifier, the domain and the listings are yours and the app loads from an address you control, leaving is a DNS change. If not, it means a new store listing.

This is worth thinking about while the app has 0 users rather than 5,000, because reviews, ratings and install base all attach to the identifier and none of them survive a new one.

Despia is framework agnostic, so it ships whatever is served at a URL you control. Rebuild the front end in Next.js, hire developers, move the backend to your own Supabase project, and as long as the same domain serves the app, every installed copy follows without a resubmission. If you want out of the runtime as well, the full Xcode and Android Studio projects export and you continue with the same identifier and the same listings.

None of that predicts you will leave Base44. Plenty of apps stay for years and should. It is the difference between a tool you chose and a tool you are stuck with, and it costs one domain registration to keep the difference.

When is the built-in path the better call?

When your app sells nothing digital, needs no offline capability, does not depend on biometrics or persistent credentials, and you have no plan to move off Base44.

One vendor and one bill is a real advantage, and a second tool buys complexity you will not use. That is a genuine and reasonably common category. An internal tool, a members area, a booking front end for an existing business, a content app with enough substance that a reviewer immediately sees why it is an app. If that is your product, use the built-in path and spend the saved time on the app itself.

Where it stops being the right call is specific and testable. You sell subscriptions or credits. Your users need the app to work on a plane or a subway. You want a login that survives a reinstall. You want the identifier and the address to be yours because the app is the business. Any one of those is enough.

Which one should you actually use?

If you are going to keep building in Base44, keep building there.

Despia ships that app to the App Store and Google Play as a real native binary, gives it the device access the stores expect, and updates it over the air, from the one codebase you already have.

Learn more about Despia in the docs or start building at despia.com.