399: NativePHP: How Simon Hamp & Shane Rosenthal are Building & Monetizing PHP on Mobile

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, I'm talking to Shane Rosenthal and Simon Hemp from the native PHP project. These fine gentlemen have brought PHP and with it my favorite web framework Laravel onto mobile devices. And I love this. They take established tech and they port it into places where you wouldn't expect. I'll be talking to Shane and Simon about how they accomplished this and maybe even more impressively, how they turned this into a profitable business at a very early stage. That's always complicated with open source stuff, so it's really, really cool to see. This episode is sponsored by paddle.com, my personal favorite merchant of record who also has something that might interest mobile developers. I recently perused a documentation for hosted checkouts because I was experimenting with the vibe coding tool that needed some payment. And I found that Paddle has built a very functional and super easy to integrate hosted checkout for mobile applications. It works for other things too, but it's meant for mobile because it just makes it so easy to get people to pay for your app. Now pair this with a solution like native PHP and you have yourself an application where all the money stuff is handled by professionals and you can just keep building in the language that you already know. It's really cool. So go check it out at paddle.com. Now here are Shane and Simon and their intriguing native PHP project. You brought PHP to mobile devices. How did you guys do this? And why did it take until 2025 of all years for someone to finally get this right? Oh, wow. This is the loaded million dollar question. It's a journey. It's been a real journey. And, I mean, in terms of taking till now and we were talking about this a few weeks ago, just like thinking, would this have even been possible a few years ago? And, honestly, I don't know the answer, but it it feels like it's all come together at this point in time. So there's definitely, there's something in the air, you know, that has enabled all of this. So, but, yeah, getting to this point, I mean, for me, personally, it started probably in 2019. I was working for a company. I saw this tweet by a fellow called Marcel Pozzi, as you might know. And he was trying to get a project called Laravel Zero to run on somebody else's computer without them having to have PHP installed. And he was using this weird library that when I went to the GitHub page, it was all in Chinese and I, you know, I kinda gave up at that point. But I it stuck in my brain, and I bookmarked the tweet. And I thought, right, when I finished this job, you know, when I get some free time, I'm gonna come back to this, and I'm gonna pick this up, and I'm gonna …