Blynk is a platform that has iOS and Android apps that can be designed in minutes to control Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and similar microboards over the internet. Blynk is sort of a prototyping board ...

You do need to set up the Arduino IDE to build for the ESP8266. That can vary by board, but here’s the instructions for the board I was using (from Adafruit; see below).

You usually think of using Blynk with an Arduino, but you can also program the embedded part directly on an ESP8266. I quickly threw together a little prototype joystick.