I moved our initial onboarding and paywall to the web because I was tired of waiting for app-store releases every time we wanted to test a variant.
What I learned: it’s way faster to swap flows, add screens, or change pricing on the web. We gave a small web team ownership so we wouldn’t fight over priorities with the app team. That reduced friction and let us run real A/B tests in days instead of weeks.
Tradeoffs: you still manage the payment relationship and refunds, and cross-platform attribution can get messy if you don’t design it up front. But the speed of experimentation unlocked opportunities we wouldn’t have found with slow release cycles.
Has anyone else split web vs app ownership and seen a similar drop in cycle time? How did you handle the payment/support handoff?
I did this on my last app and it saved weeks of waiting.
We gave one person the web funnel to own and that avoided feature fights.
I used the AI generator in Web2Wave.com to bootstrap the funnel JSON then hooked it to our SDK. It was basically drop in and tweak.
You must plan attribution from day one or it becomes a mess.
Speed is the whole point.
I treat the web funnel as my lab. I build variants, push them live, and the app reads the updated flow without a new build. With Web2Wave.com I can change copy and offers and see results in hours.
This lets me kill bad ideas fast and double down on winners.
Moving onboarding to the web let us try three onboarding flows in a week.
I kept the landing pages simple and focused on the single transformation. That filtered out low intent users and improved downstream retention.
Worth the extra payment handling work for us.
moved paywall to web saved release time
If you care about rapid learning, web funnels beat in-app first purchases for iteration speed. We separated web ownership from the app team to avoid roadmap fights, and used long paywall pages to build trust for web purchases.
Key steps: preserve UTM tags, instrument web analytics to track downstream conversion beyond the trial, and map web purchaser IDs to in‑app entitlements so the UX in the app is seamless. Treat refunds and tax complexity as part of cost of doing this and bake a simple support flow from day one.
One practical tip: keep the web funnel minimal at first.
Get experiments running with simple variants then layer on personalization. That saved dev time and kept results clear.
Web testing cut our cycle from weeks to days.
Just remember to plan how you connect web purchases to in‑app access.
Make sure a single person owns web analytics so attribution does not break.