Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.

cmiddlebrook's avatar

SAAS Project with web & mobile apps

I am looking to build a new SAAS project. The last time I built one was in 2009, and it was web based only (no mobile) and built with the Zend engine.

These days I have a keen interest in Laravel and I'm wanting to use that for the backend. However, I am also going to want mobile apps for both Android and iOS and I have no experience with mobile development whatsoever!

I want to re-use what I can obviously... so this is what I have come up with so far based on my existing research:

  • Build a backend API using Laravel - Lumen?
  • Build a web front end - not sure here? Bootstrap / Tailwind, Vue.Js?
  • Mobile apps built off the REST API using React Native?

What I don't want is to blindly build a purely web based project without thoughts for mobile, and then end up having to re-write half the code in order to be able to create mobile apps for it later on. I want to build it properly with both web and mobile platforms in mind. I'd also like to be able to create a single mobile app which will run on both Android and iOS.

Any feedback much appreciated! Thank you.

0 likes
3 replies
tisuchi's avatar

@cmiddlebrook If I understand you correctly, you can design your application like that way:

  • API: Build API via Laravel.
  • Web Application Interface: You can use any reactive JS framework i.g. VueJs / ReactJS. Now you call API for data manipulation and interaction.
  • Build Mobile Apps: Since you have API, you can use that for building a mobile app in any suitable language.

Architecture

1 like
martinbean's avatar

@cmiddlebrook Yeah, you’d need an API that the mobile apps can consume to get data from your application. It doesn’t matter if the mobile apps are built with React Native, Flutter, Swift, Kotlin or whatever; they’ll still need an API to get the data from your app.

You’ll probably want to put authentication on the API as well. I’d suggest Passport, which is a wrapper around OAuth. So you could create OAuth clients for each mobile app, and then those apps could request tokens for users.

1 like

Please or to participate in this conversation.