A boutique gym owner in Charlotte had her booking app running fine on phones, but her members kept asking for something bigger: a way to check class schedules on the flat-screen mounted in the lobby, and eventually, a way to pull up workout videos on the TVs at home. She wasn’t building for one device anymore. She was building for a scattered collection of screens her members actually used throughout their day, and she had no coding background to make any of it happen herself
That’s a more common problem than it sounds. People assume “building an app” means picking one platform and committing. Increasingly, it means building something that shows up correctly everywhere a person happens to be looking
The Old Assumption Was One App, One Device
For years, building digital tools meant choosing a lane. A mobile app for phones. A separate web app for browsers. If you wanted a presence on a smart TV, that meant an entirely different development process, different programming languages, different app store requirements, usually requiring a specialist nobody outside a dedicated tech team actually had
Small business owners mostly gave up on multi-device thinking because of this. A boutique fitness studio, a local bakery, a small nonprofit, none of these had the budget to build three separate versions of the same basic tool. So most settled for one platform and let everything else go unaddressed
No Code Development Platforms Changed the Math Entirely
No code development platforms didn’t just make single-app building easier. They made cross-platform building realistic for people without technical backgrounds at all. Tools like Adalo, Glide, and Bubble now let someone describe what they need once and generate versions that work reasonably well across phone browsers, tablets, and desktop screens without touching a separate codebase for each
The Charlotte gym owner used exactly this approach. She built her scheduling and booking tool once, then adjusted the layout slightly for a larger screen format so it displayed cleanly on the lobby TV. She didn’t hire anyone. She didn’t learn a programming language. She just described what she needed in each context and adjusted the visual layout herself, testing it on an actual screen until it looked right
Smart TVs Are a Bigger Piece of This Than People Expect
Here’s the surprising part. A meaningful chunk of what people now expect from “an app” runs through their television, not their phone or a browser tab. Samsung smart TV apps in particular have become a genuine expectation for businesses offering any kind of video content, workout programs, cooking classes, meditation sessions, things people want to watch on a bigger screen rather than squint at on a phone propped against a countertop
A small yoga studio built exactly this kind of experience. Their existing content, recorded classes members could stream on demand, worked fine as a web page. It felt clunky on a television, though, requiring members to mirror their phone screen or fuss with a laptop HDMI cable just to follow along during a home practice. Once they used no-code development platforms to package that same content into a proper smart TV app, member engagement with the on-demand library increased noticeably. People simply used it more when it worked the way a normal streaming app would, without extra steps standing between them and pressing play.
The Content Usually Matters More Than the Platform Itself
A mistake worth avoiding here: assuming cross-platform reach automatically means more engagement. It doesn’t, if the actual content isn’t worth showing up for in the first place. The yoga studio’s television app succeeded because their class library was genuinely good. A weak product spread across five screens is still a weak product, just now inconvenient in more places at once
Testing on the Actual Device Matters More Than People Assume
A layout that looks clean on a laptop screen can look cramped or oddly proportioned on a television, where viewing distance and remote-based navigation work completely differently than a mouse and keyboard. The gym owner learned this after her first lobby TV attempt showed schedule text far too small to read from across the room. She adjusted font sizes and spacing specifically for that screen, testing from the actual distance members would be standing, rather than assuming what worked on her laptop would translate directly.
Where This Approach Still Has Real Limits
Complex, highly customized interactions, think a heavily animated game or something requiring precise real-time syncing across screens, still push past what no-code tools handle gracefully. A business with that kind of ambitious vision likely still needs actual developers eventually. But for straightforward content delivery, scheduling, and basic interactive tools, the gap between “needs a developer” and “buildable by a motivated small business owner” has narrowed considerably
What This Actually Means for Small Business Owners
The Charlotte gym owner didn’t set out to become a cross-platform developer. She just kept noticing where her members were getting frustrated, a lobby screen that couldn’t display anything useful, a TV that wouldn’t play class videos properly, and addressed each gap herself rather than assuming it required a specialist she couldn’t afford. That’s really the shift worth paying attention to here. The tools didn’t just get easier to use. They made “wherever my customers are looking” a realistic goal instead of an expensive luxury reserved for bigger companies.
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