Appbrew

10/16/2026

Week 1

This was last week of what we shipped.

Milo is live, try it in Appbrew dashboard!

10/13/2026

Today we’re launching Milo, your app agent that designs, builds, and grows your mobile app.

Milo turns your website into a beautiful native app that looks and feels like your brand. Show it a reference, and it designs the screen.

Need a block that doesn’t exist? Milo builds it for you.

Then it launches your push and campaigns.

Milo powers your mobile analytics. It sees everything in your app, and tells you what to do next.

Think of Milo as a second brain inside your app. It thinks through what you ask, studies what’s happening on your storefront, chooses the right move, and makes it. Then it watches how customers respond, so every suggestion is sharper than the last.

Ask. Build. Learn. Ask again.

That’s the growth flywheel behind every app on Appbrew.

Try Milo today.

10/09/2026

New things are happening at Appbrew

10/01/2026

Headless commerce was promised as the future of site experiences, but it has largely failed to deliver on that potential.

I have spent years working with different tech stacks, including Shopify Hydrogen and Oxygen. After running A/B tests comparing traditional themes against these setups, the results were clear: the complexity often outweighs the benefits, and support has dwindled. For those focused on ecommerce development, the promise of a better app-like feel just has not materialized.

Instead of chasing the hype, most brands should focus on the tools they already have. With Shopify sections rendering, you can create high-performing site experiences without the overhead of a headless architecture. It is time to stop over-engineering your storefront and start using the features that actually move the needle.

Subscribe for weekly DTC operator breakdowns, and let me know your take on the headless debate in the comments.

09/25/2026

The instinct to protect “premium positioning” is usually protecting a feeling, not a number.

The model everyone reaches for is Apple. Who sell in full price, no sales, ever.

Apple earned that position over decades, with a queue outside its stores before the product even ships.

Zara runs scheduled sales twice a year and nobody questions its brand.

Costco built an empire on being the cheapest option in the room.

Premium isn’t a pricing rule. It’s a position you’ve already earned or you haven’t.

And the fear that discounting “trains customers to wait” misses something basic: most of your traffic hasn’t bought from you yet.

There’s no habit to train. You’d be protecting a relationship that doesn’t exist. Hovhannes Mkhitaryan, who’s spent 15 years inside the Shopify ecosystem, breaks this down on the latest episode of Brewed.

His take: discount when it makes sense, return to baseline when it doesn’t, and stop pretending to be Apple before you’ve earned it.

Watch the full episode.

Link in comments.

09/21/2026

Think a fancy sizing app will fix your return rates?

Hovhannes Mkhitaryan has tested them. All of them.

What actually works is almost boring. Weight and
height brackets. Plain language. If someone’s between
sizes, tell them to size up or down.

Within a few seconds, a shopper should know exactly
which bucket they’re in.

The simpler thing wins, because nobody has time for
the complicated one.

Hovhannes has spent 15 years inside the Shopify
ecosystem.

The full episode of Brewed covers his whole
CRO playbook: search vs browsing, discounting,
and why the app is the most underused channel a
brand owns.

Link in bio

09/21/2026

09/14/2026

Comment “CRO” I’ll personally share the full episode.

“Search is a crutch.”

That’s Hovhannes Mkhitaryan, Co-Founder of The
The Growth Chef Marketing Group, in the new episode of Brewed.

He’s spent 15 years inside the Shopify ecosystem.
Operator, consultant, and founder of his own DTC
brand. He’s the person fashion brands call when
traffic is up but conversion is stuck.

Apparel brands are relying on search functionality as a crutch for bad collection pages. It is costing them conversions.

Most stores treat search as a safety net.
When traffic spikes but sales stay flat, the issue is often that the collection pages are too complex.

We break down why this happens and how to simplify the user journey. Improving your ecommerce conversion rate is not just about adding features. It is about clearing the path to purchase.

We look at the data behind traffic sources and how to maximize customer value over time.

Watch the full episode, link in comments.

Also in this episode:

→ Why every body scan and virtual fit app he
tested moved nothing on conversion or returns
→ The discounting myth most founders repeat
without ever defending it
→ Why headless commerce never delivered, and
why he doesn’t think it will
→ What happens when founders get too many layers
away from their own customer

Full episode is out now. Link in the comments.

09/04/2026

mCaffeine's skincare runs on coffee. Their app runs on Appbrew. See how India's first caffeinated personal care brand turned its mobile app into 30% of DTC revenue, with 2.3x higher conversion than web.

In 2016, after a moment of curiosity involving a tea bag and puffy eyes, Tarun Sharma and co-founders launched India's first caffeinated personal care brand. Coffee was something you scrubbed on your face because your mother said so, not something a brand was built around. They turned a home hack into a formulated product line for a generation that had outgrown both.

Within five years they had sold over 10 million products across 18,000 pin codes. Today more than 5 million customers have used the brand. Proof that owning one ingredient completely can be a stronger position than competing on everything.

Then they built the mobile experience to match.

The results:
→ 2.3x higher conversion rate on app vs web
→ 10.2% higher average order value
→ ~30% of DTC revenue now flowing through the app

Nearly a third of their direct revenue, on a channel they fully own. No algorithm deciding who sees them. No cost per message to reach a customer who already loves the brand.

Inside the app: ingredient and concern-led product discovery, "Watch and Shop" creator videos, trust-first product pages with before-and-after sliders and consumer study data, "Skinification" routine building, and a cart designed to lift average order value.

Read the full case study: https://www.appbrew.com/case-studies/mcaffeine

Appbrew turns a Shopify store into a native iOS and Android app, built for conversion, retention, and customer lifetime value. 250+ Shopify brands are already scaling on it.

Start a free trial: https://apps.shopify.com/mobile-app-builder-appbrew
Book a demo: https://www.appbrew.com/demo

Congratulations to Tarun and the entire mCaffeine team, and to Aayushi Jain, Himanshu Bharati and Pranjal Sarda. Proud to be building alongside you.

09/03/2026

“Just make the app look like our website.”

Every founder briefs it that way. It sounds like the
simplest ask in the world.

It is the hardest one we get.

Sharat, co-founder and CPO, has a line for it. Apps
and web are similar, but not same. And similar not same
is a very big gap.

Here is what actually sits inside that gap.

50% of brands want the identical experience across
web and app. The other 50% want something entirely new
in the app. Two different workflows, one implementation
team, and the pathways change completely depending on
which half you are serving.

The design system is where it really breaks. Fonts,
icons, colours, button designs, input boxes, element
spacing. The basic atoms. Every brand wants a slight
tweak on each one. Nobody accepts the default.

Ten to twelve parameters, each with its own set of
tweaks. Combine them and you are looking at thousands
of possible variations.

You can do this manually. Over two weeks. Three weeks.
Four.

That is precisely the problem.

Most people think the hard part of building an app
platform is the app. It is not. It is the combinatorial
maths of everyone wanting something slightly different.

We spent this year rebuilding for exactly that.

If you have shipped both a website and an app for the
same brand, what surprised you most about the gap?