Layerz

Layerz is an app design tool that runs on an iPhone, iPad or Mac and produces working native iOS apps rather than pictures of them. You draw screens with real iOS components, attach data, wire up behaviour with a visual flow, and run the result on the device in your hand. No computer, no Xcode, no code. It's aimed at the gap between a mockup and a build, where an idea usually gets handed from a designer to a developer and loses something on the way. The copyright line dates the company to 2024, and the App Store listing is where most people will first meet it.

The problem it describes is fragmentation. Traditional app work spreads across several tools and several people. Screens live in a design app, data lives somewhere else, and the behaviour is explained in a document that whoever builds it has to interpret. Layerz keeps design, data and behaviour in one running application, so what you see while designing is what the app actually does when you tap it. It works in four steps. Design is done with native interactive components, Auto Layout, stacks, lists and tabs, rather than web-based drawings that imitate them. Data comes next. You define data models and bind them to the interface, and when the data changes the screen updates on its own. Behaviour is added in Action Flow, the visual logic layer, where a tap can navigate, load, branch on a condition or call a real API. Then you run it, immediately, on iPhone, iPad or Mac, with no build step in between.

The API side is more capable than most prototyping tools. Layerz imports an OpenAPI 3.x or Swagger 2.0 spec and lets you bind live responses to screens on a visual node canvas, so a server developer with a fresh endpoint can see real data flowing through a real interface without writing a client. Beyond that there's a camera with 38 chainable filters, device services such as location, battery, connectivity and timers, support for Lottie animations, video and audio, and a design system built from color and typography tokens grouped into themes you can switch between.

Getting started is installing it from the App Store on the device you want to design on and opening a new canvas. Because the components are the real iOS ones, the first screen you lay out already behaves the way the finished app would, and adding a data model turns placeholder lists into ones backed by actual records. The documentation on the site walks through the concepts and the blog covers what's new, but the site's own pitch is that you learn it by running what you've made and tapping on it.

Compared with a design tool, the difference is that nothing here is a picture. A prototype in a design tool is a set of frames with hotspots, and the moment someone asks what happens with real data the answer is a shrug. Layerz answers by running the thing. Compared with no-code builders that generate a project for you to compile elsewhere, the difference is the absence of a build step and a computer. The design is the app while you're working on it, and it runs on the device in your hand rather than in a simulator on a desk.

The site names planners, designers, server developers, solo developers and hobbyists as the people it's for, and that list is telling. It's for the person who has the idea and the device but not the toolchain, or the backend developer who wants to show an API doing something before a frontend exists. Sharing is built around the .layerz file. Send it to anyone with Layerz installed and they can open it and experience the design for free, on their own device, with the real interactions intact. Where it differs from the usual prototyping tools is that the output isn't a click-through. Components are native, data is live, and the app runs as an app. The limits are the mirror image. Everything is Apple only, a shared app needs Layerz on the other end to open it, and the homepage doesn't describe exporting code or shipping a finished app to the App Store, so it's a design and prototyping tool first and a build tool second. Action Flow is visual, but a complex app still takes time to think through.

Access is free. Layerz is free to download and try on the App Store and the Mac App Store, and a Mac build is also available from the project's GitHub releases. The site doesn't list any paid tier, so if one exists inside the app it isn't described publicly. There's documentation and a blog on the site, and support is reachable at support@layerz.app. The .layerz sharing model means a client or teammate needs only the free app to see what you've made, which keeps the cost of showing work at zero.