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Native SDK
Native SDK is the complete toolkit for building native desktop applications.
Native SDK exists because expressive UI and native performance should not be competing goals. Developers often choose web-based runtimes because they offer freedom, speed and control over the product experience. But that freedom often comes with a heavy runtime. Native SDK keeps the expressive authoring model and replaces the runtime with native rendering.
Views are declarative markup in .native files, logic is plain Zig, and Native SDK's own engine draws every pixel into real OS windows — no browser, no WebView, no interpreter in the binary.
Soundboard, Notes, and Calculator from examples/ — every pixel drawn by the Native SDK engine, captured through its deterministic reference renderer. The images follow your color scheme.
Quick start
Install the CLI:
npm install -g @native-sdk/cli
Create and run an app:
native init my_app cd my_app native dev
A native window opens with a working counter. The whole view is src/app.native — a markup file that binds values and dispatches messages:
All logic lives in src/main.zig: a Model struct, a Msg union, and one update function — the only place state changes:
pub fn update(model: *Model, msg: Msg) void { switch (msg) { .increment => model.count += 1, .decrement => model.count -= 1, .reset => model.count = 0, } }
Edit src/app.native while native dev runs and the window updates in place, keeping your state. native check validates every view in milliseconds without building, native test runs full-loop UI tests headlessly, and native build produces an optimized release binary.
Read the full guide at zero-native.dev/quick-start.
What you get
Beautiful by default — Great software should not start from a blank slate. The built-in component catalog — buttons, tabs, text fields, dialogs, charts, virtual lists, and more — ships with considered typography, spacing, and color, so the app native init scaffolds already looks intentional the first time its window opens.
Customizable by design — Your app should have its own identity, not ours. Styling is design tokens end to end: color, radius, and typography resolve by name, re-resolve live when the theme changes, and can be replaced wholesale — examples/soundboard and examples/deck are the same music player separated only by tokens and a chrome pass.
Native from the start — Every interface is rendered without a browser or WebView. The engine draws into real OS windows while scroll physics, menus, dialogs, the tray, and text input stay with the operating system, and markup compiles into the executable at build time, so a release build carries no parser or interpreter — the scaffolded counter app builds to a single binary a few megabytes small.
Predictable state — State changes should be explicit, inspectable and easy to reason about. Events produce messages, messages update state, and state renders the interface; markup can bind and dispatch but never mutate. The loop is so deterministic that native automate record journals a session and replay reproduces it headlessly, verified frame by frame against state fingerprints.
Simple authoring — Interfaces should be easy to read, easy to write and easy to generate. Views are elements, flex layout, {bindings}, and expressions like selected="{f == filter}", and native check validates every view against your app's actual Model and Msg — bindings, iterables, message tags — in milliseconds, with file:line:column errors that teach.
AI is part of the workflow — Native SDK is designed for a world where humans and AI agents build software together. Every app embeds an automation server, so any agent can read accessibility snapshots, drive widgets, assert on live state, and take deterministic screenshots of the running window; accessibility findings are machine-checked in native check; and the CLI ships the agent skills that teach all of it (native skills list).
Examples
The apps pictured above live in examples/, most as zero-config projects — app.zon plus src/, no build files — run straight from their directory with native dev.
Example What it shows
calculator A complete small app: markup keypad, keyboard input, chrome shortcuts, theming.
notes Persistence through the effects channel: debounced writes, restore on boot, dialogs, search.
soundboard Album grid with decoded cover art, context menus, timers, and a custom theme.
deck The soundboard player rebuilt as a dense hardware chassis: two windows, same widgets, different tokens.
feed A 100,000-row list, virtualized with runtime-owned scrolling.
The full catalog in examples/README.md also covers guarded OS capabilities, GPU surfaces, WebView composition, web-frontend shells, and the iOS/Android embed hosts.
Platforms
macOS is the primary development platform and carries the deepest support: Metal presentation, OS scroll physics, native context menus, app menus, tray, and dialogs. Linux runs the full showcase through the deterministic software renderer in real windows, with pointer, keyboard, scroll, IME composition, and HiDPI; Windows runs on a Win32 host with IME composition and is exercised in CI, including real input injection. Mobile support is experimental: iOS is simulator-proven through the embed library and Android cross-compiles with the full embed ABI, but APIs and tooling on both are still evolving — desktop is the mature surface. WebView surfaces coexist on every desktop platform. The platform support matrix documents exactly what each host supports today.
Documentation
The full documentation is at zero-native.dev.
Quick Start — install to a running, tested app
Philosophy — the six principles behind the toolkit
App Model — the model/message/update loop, wiring, and hot reload
Native UI — every element, attribute, and pattern in the markup
Components — the component catalog
State & Data Flow — derive-don't-store, bindings, and text editing
Testing — full-loop UI tests, headless on any machine
Automation — snapshots, widget driving, record/replay, screenshots
Capabilities — guarded OS services: notifications, clipboard, dialogs, credentials
Packaging — from binary to distributable app
Platform Support — what each host supports today
Contributing
Native SDK is pre-1.0: APIs still move, and the toolkit is evolving quickly. Bug reports and focused pull requests are welcome — for larger changes, open an issue first so the design can be discussed. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup and local checks.
License
Apache-2.0
