Turning a Web App into a Mobile App- Is it a huge undertaking?
I launched a web app but now I'd like to turn my app into a mobile app too.
I'm wondering if there are any shortcuts to this?
I've never made a full mobile app but I've played around with react native and swift.
I designed my app to be mobile responsive, so maybe this will help. My frontend is made in React.
From the little I know about mobile apps, it seems like the only native aspects I need are:
- push notifications
- something like web sockets for a chat area and maybe in app notifications
App store listing is important, because that's where my users are searching. I believe this takes PWA's off the table, but I'm not sure.
Should be Apple and Android friendly.
So the best option I know anything about that seems to fit my requirements is to go with React native. But that seems like a big undertaking. Is there any faster way? Like a way to just serve up my web app from inside a native app so that my app could show up in the app stores, give me some push notification access, but I don't have to recreate so much of what I've built?
Hi Dashiell I hope you are fine.
Did some of your users ask for a mobile app ?
How did you know that some of your user looked for an app like wishtender on mobile App Store ?
Plus, I wonder if apple will not want to take a cut of the revenue you generate with your app. I just looked into it and voilà a kind of answer https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-onlyfans-isnt-in-the-app-stores-11620940024 .
Personally, if you go this route, I think that going with React-native is the easiest way to move forward. You can start easily with Expo and Amplify since the logic/components can be shared. It also seems like they have a page for it https://docs.expo.dev/workflow/web to only have one code base.
Hope this helps.
My users have been requesting a mobile app for a while. Some of them don't have a desktop, and just use the browser on their phone. So for 6 months I've made it work. I can probably go a while without a mobile app still, but I think a mobile app with push notifications would reduce the friction of the app. I remember some people saying they couldn't find my app and that's because they were looking in the app store and hadn't realized it was a web app.
Thanks for sharing the info about only fans- I'll have to look more into that. I don't have access to the WSJ. But if only fans isn't in the app store, it makes me wonder if only fans has a PWA and if my users might actually be more familiar with PWA's. But it's my understanding there are limitations to PWA's especially on apple.
Thanks for your suggestion I will check it out.
You should definitely not make a native app but instead wrap your website in a webview using react native. It will be much faster and make your life easier later on.
Also, I agree with @Rizialdi, how do you know your users are searching for your app on the App Store. Search on the Apple App Store is terrible and makes discovery very hard.
Why not add one of the “Available on the Apple App Store” buttons to your site and see if anyone clicks it. You could send them to a form for more details on why and the feature set.
Good luck.
That “Available on the Apple App Store” test is so smart! I love it. A few have told me they looked there because they didn't understand it was a web app.
"rap your website in a webview using react native." Thank you, this is like what I'm looking for but didn't know the terminology or if it was possible. Do you think this would still enable me to have push notifications?
Webviews have very high performance and you won’t have any performance issues unless you’re doing fancy WebGL or ML in the browser.
But I agree, unless done right the UX could be off. But for a simple site you can make it look good using CSS.
Yes. Push notifications will work well.
I wonder if wrapping the entire app into a web view would be a great UX. Ionic of Cordova are some attempts for doing it. The issue when the app grows is that wrapping it leads to performance issues. May be reading this article might help https://pagepro.co/blog/react-native-vs-ionic-and-cordova-comparison/. In my opinion, it would be conter productive to invest time and energy to have in the end an app far from native apps.
The key take away about WSJ article is that for each money transaction in an app, Apple or Google take a cut (around 30% for Apple). And for your model, I don’t think it’s viable.
Just my two cents and Happy news year.
wow thats a high cut! I will have to look into that