Elm Native Apps

Elm was designed for the web, but with a few modern tools that help bridge the gap between Web and Native, there are ways to get your Elm app working as a native app.

Tauri is a toolkit for using web technologies to build desktop and mobile (in alpha) apps. It uses Rust for the backend and web technologies for the frontend. Elm can be used as the frontend technology.

Elm’s

uses XHR, while Tauri prefers

. To manage CORS, developers proxy HTTP requests through Rust.

The

polyfill may help bridge XHR gaps with

, but

and flat out won't work for some features (i.e. FormData and Blob support).

Capacitor is a cross-platform app runtime that makes it easy to build web apps that run natively on iOS, Android, Electron, and the web.

Unlike Tauri, Capacitor's philosophy is that past abstraction efforts over platforms (i.e. Cordova) failed because the platforms (Android, iOS, Desktop) are fundamentally different, so Capacitor seeks to expose first class access to underlying platforms, and doesn't trying hide away the full native project + build process.

Note: The team behind Capacitor also makes the Ionic UI framework and pushes it heavily, which can cause confusion. Ionic won't play nice with Elm (it relies on JS componentry and behaviours), but you don't need Ionic to use Capacitor!

Other projects that might be abandoned now, but could be worth looking into: