You can go from Figma design to live app onboarding without a handoff by importing your frames directly as flow screens. The Setgreet Figma plugin turns selected frames into a draft flow: frames become screens, layers become native components, and Auto Layout maps to a Flexbox layout system. You review the mapping in a panel before anything is created, adjust what detection got wrong, and publish to your live app without an App Store release. No engineering ticket, no re-implementation, no weeks of drift between what the designer shipped and what users see.
What the handoff really costs
The standard pipeline looks like this: a designer finishes the onboarding redesign in Figma, writes a handoff doc, and opens a ticket. An engineer re-implements every screen in SwiftUI or Compose, interpreting spacing, radii, and type styles by inspecting the file. Then the work waits for the next release train, then for review, then for users to update.
Notice where the time actually goes. Review itself is fast: Apple reports that 90% of submissions are reviewed in under 24 hours. The expensive part is everything before it: the re-implementation, the QA pass on two platforms, the release schedule. And after all that, details drift anyway. The padding is 12 instead of 16. The button color is close but not the token. Nobody made a mistake; translating a design between two mediums by hand just loses information.
For a settings screen you touch once a year, that cost is tolerable. For growth screens, it compounds.
Why onboarding pays the highest price
Your onboarding flow is the part of your app you should change most often, and under a handoff model it is the part that is most expensive to change. Every reordered screen, every copy test, every new value proposition slide is a design file, a ticket, a rebuild, and a release.
So teams stop iterating. The onboarding that shipped at launch is still running eight months later, not because it won, but because touching it costs a sprint. The teams that win move the other way: an analysis published by Adapty in 2026 found that apps running 50 or more experiments had 18.7x the median revenue of apps running one. That is correlation, not causation, but the direction is hard to ignore. If you want to A/B test your onboarding flow at any real cadence, the marginal cost of shipping a variant has to fall toward zero. Handoff keeps it high.
How a direct Figma to app import works
With the Setgreet Figma plugin, you sign in with your dashboard credentials, select 1 to 20 frames, and import them as a draft flow. Each frame becomes a screen. Layers become components: Text, Button, Image, Container, Card, Divider, and more. Auto Layout maps to Setgreet's Flexbox layout system, so the structure that made your design responsive in Figma stays responsive in the app. Image fills and complex vector fills are exported as PNGs and uploaded to storage automatically.
Detection is transparent rather than magical. Before anything is created, a mapping panel shows what the plugin thinks each layer is, with green, yellow, and red confidence indicators, and you can override any mapping per component. If you name layers with [type] prefixes, like [button] or [image], those map with full confidence. The result is a faithful structural import: real, editable components in the flow editor, not a flat screenshot of your design.
The output is always a draft with a linear graph from start to end. Nothing reaches users until you publish, and once you do, later changes ship to your live app without an App Store release.
Where manual adjustment still happens
An honest import path is clear about what it does not do. The plugin brings in structure and content, not behavior: button actions, navigation, triggers, and branching are set up in the editor after import. Imports are linear only, and each import creates a new flow rather than updating an existing one, so treat it as the start of an iteration, not a live sync with your Figma file.
A few visual details need review too. Detection is good, not perfect; that is exactly what the mapping panel is for. Mixed text styles inside a single text layer are not supported, complex vectors fall back to PNG, and all text renders in Inter today, with custom fonts on the roadmap. So plan for a short pass in the editor after import: wire up the buttons, confirm the mapping, check spacing on a device preview. That pass is small compared to re-implementing every screen by hand, and it ends with screens you can keep editing without ever going back through a ticket.
Meeting your app's design tokens
Imported screens should look like they belong in your app, and that comes down to design tokens. Setgreet's App Theme system syncs your app's visual identity, its colors, typography, and spacing, into the flow editor. On iOS and Android the sync happens automatically when the SDK initializes; on React Native and Flutter you call syncTheme() once. Either way, the editor holds your app's real palette: 29 semantic color roles, light plus optional dark, and a 15-style type scale.
That matters for imports because you adjust screens against your actual tokens instead of eyeballing hex values from a Figma file. Style a button with @theme tokens like @primary or @onSurface and it resolves from your app's own palette when the flow is instantiated, so every platform renders the same resolved theme. And if your designer refines colors by hand in the dashboard's Brand tab, those manual edits are never overwritten by a later SDK sync. The design file gets you the structure; the theme keeps it native.
Frequently asked questions
Does an imported Figma flow go live immediately?
No. Every import creates a draft flow with a linear graph from start to end, and nothing reaches users until you publish it. That gives you room to wire up button actions, set triggers, and review the component mapping first. Once you publish, updates roll out to your live app without waiting on an App Store release.
Can the plugin update an existing flow?
Not today. Each import creates a new draft flow rather than merging changes into one that already exists. If you have redesigned a live onboarding, import the new frames as a fresh draft, rebuild the behavior in the editor, and publish it when it is ready to replace the old version.
Will my brand fonts come through from Figma?
Text imports as editable text components, but everything renders in Inter today; custom fonts through the plugin are on the roadmap, so do not count on brand typography from the import alone. Colors are a different story: sync your App Theme and imported screens can use your app's real semantic color roles through @theme tokens.