What is Flowy? The Visual Builder for Mobile Onboarding

Every mobile app gets one shot at a first impression. The moment a user opens your app for the first time, you have roughly 60 seconds to show them value — or lose them forever.

Yet most teams still treat onboarding as an afterthought. A hardcoded series of screens, buried in the codebase, that no one wants to touch because changing a single button label means a full sprint cycle and an App Store review.

Flowy was built to fix this.

The Onboarding Problem

The data is clear: nearly 60% of users drop off within the first three screens of a mobile app. That’s not a design problem — it’s a speed-to-experiment problem.

Here’s what a typical onboarding change looks like today:

Product manager writes a Jira ticket requesting a copy change
Designer updates the mockup
Developer picks up the ticket in the next sprint
QA validates the change
The team submits to the App Store and waits 24-48 hours for review
The experiment finally goes live — 3 to 4 weeks later

By the time the experiment is live, the user acquisition context might have already changed. The campaign that drove those users has ended. The seasonal moment has passed.

Teams that win at retention don’t wait weeks to iterate. They experiment daily.

What is Flowy?

Flowy is a visual campaign builder designed specifically for mobile onboarding flows. It lets product teams design, target, and deploy onboarding experiments — without writing code and without waiting for app store reviews.

Think of it as the bridge between your design tool and your live app. You design the screens visually, define who sees what, and deploy instantly through our lightweight SDK.

The core idea is simple

Your onboarding UI shouldn’t live inside your app binary. It should be server-driven — fetched at runtime, so you can change it without shipping a new version.

Flowy provides:

A visual editor to design onboarding screens with real mobile components (buttons, text, images, carousels, progress bars)
Audience targeting to show different flows to different user segments
A/B testing built in, so you can compare variants with statistical rigor
A lightweight SDK (React Native today, Flutter and native coming soon) that renders your flows natively

How It Works

Flowy follows a three-step process that keeps things simple for the entire team:

1. Design

Open the visual editor and build your onboarding flow. Drag and drop real mobile components — buttons, text blocks, images, videos, rating prompts, progress indicators. Preview everything on a pixel-perfect phone simulator.

No Figma-to-code handoff. No waiting for developers. What you see is what your users get.

2. Target & Test

Define who sees your flow. New users from a specific campaign? Users in a particular country? Returning users who haven’t completed setup?

Set up A/B tests by creating variants of any screen. Flowy handles the traffic splitting and tracks conversion through each step of your funnel.

3. Deploy

Hit publish. Your flow goes live in seconds — no app update required. The SDK fetches the latest configuration at runtime and renders it natively on the user’s device.

Want to roll back? One click. Want to pause an experiment? Instant. No app store review cycles.

Why Server-Driven UI?

The traditional approach of hardcoding onboarding screens means every change requires a new app version. Server-driven UI flips this model: your app binary contains the rendering engine, while the content and layout come from the server.

This approach gives you:

Instant updates — no app store review required
Per-user personalization — show different flows to different segments
Risk-free experimentation — roll back any change instantly
Faster iteration cycles — go from idea to live experiment in minutes, not weeks

Flowy’s SDK is designed to render server-driven layouts with native performance. No web views, no compromises. Your onboarding feels like it was hardcoded — because it’s rendered with the same native components.

Who Is Flowy For?

Flowy is built for the entire product team:

Product Managers who want to experiment with onboarding flows without filing engineering tickets
Growth Teams who need to run A/B tests on first-time user experiences and iterate quickly based on data
Mobile Developers who are tired of re-deploying the app just to change onboarding copy, and want a clean SDK integration instead

If you’re building a mobile app and care about user activation, retention, and conversion — Flowy gives you the tools to move fast.

What’s Next

We’re currently in early access and actively building with our first cohort of teams. Here’s what’s on the roadmap:

Flutter SDK — expanding beyond React Native
Native iOS and Android SDKs — for teams not using cross-platform frameworks
Advanced analytics — deeper funnel analysis and cohort tracking
Template library — proven onboarding patterns you can customize and deploy instantly

We believe the best onboarding experiences are built through experimentation, not guesswork. If that resonates with you, we’d love to have you join us.

Join the waitlist and be part of shaping how mobile onboarding is built.