Anyone tried building an Android & IOS app that just displays your web app?
Like a packaged browser that only displays your web app, your web app being mobile responsive and fully compatible with mobile off course.
Pros
- Dedicated app button on user's mobile
- Access to camera from web app is useful
Cons
- I guess packaged browser needs regular security and maintenance updates
How would you build that? Or any service available that does this?
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Not sure about Android but iOS usually rejects apps that just display a webview.
Learned this the hard way :)
Please be aware that Apple (google, too, but slightly less so) has gotten pretty stringent on not allowing HTML5/webview wrapper apps. Especially when games are involved. This has been getting worse over the past few months.
Here's some reading for you on the subject:
https://love2dev.com/blog/apple-encouraging-progressive-web-apps-by-rejecting-apps/
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=06032019j
Very good info 👍
I'm not going to spend time and money on generation service posted here or full native app. I will explore PWAs
I would use ionic framework.
+1. Especially for offline availability, less data traffic and if you keep thinking about that idea you would probably end with a PWA, for which ionic is the perfect choice.
You could also try a progressive web app (PWA), which allows users to install on the home screen in both iOS and Android, although different mechanisms for both.
Unfortunately, I had an app denied by Apple because the app was too much like the mobile version in Safari. Someone else in this thread had their approved, so might still get through. I eventually went with the PWA approach.
I was using Cordova to accomplish this at first, wrapping a React app. I probably wouldn't choose Cordova again, for anything advanced, I found it really hard to work with.
Note that PWA is served directly through website and not as a legit app from play-store. Good if you don't want to get through play-store.
PWA: Nice. Chrome OS, iOS, Android, seems perfect 💎
Regarding your con, you don’t need to package a browser. Both iOS and android allow you to use web views built into the OS.
Nice! 😍
take a look at this
https://www.appypie.com/convert-website-to-mobile-apps
Interesting. I watched the video and they mention having an app which doesn't add native features has less chance of being approved for the app stores. Is that true?
here's another https://phonegap.com/
I think if you use these tools and it generate an actual app and you submit
it to Apple they will accept it.. but it has to come from you and not done through these sites
I think some apps used to do that like Facebook but they switched to a native app due to performance and maintenance issues I believe
These seem to be leading cross-platform frameworks:
Experience anyone?
https://gist.github.com/dmjio/d3bfd07eff3e5a37a7b8141aa87e4acb
This is all the code you'd need to do that. It just creates a WebView and points it to your website. Fully-native application.
I learned now that your app will probably not get approved. Thanks for the suggestion though.
React native apps get approved. Why is this different ?
It seems like having an app that's just a web view doesn't pass approval easily anymore since mid 2019.
Another IHer posted an article here how apple wants you to use a PWA instead and not submit to app store.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
What about Ionic??
Yes I’ve been maintaining a project up until the end of 2019 that was based on this technique (project launched in 2014).
It’s a Cordova webview loading a remote web app. The web app can still access the device APIs through the Cordova API.
It’s tricky to test and maintain though
Thanks for the info
I built a web app on Bubble and wrapped it as a native application. Got approved by Apple. Wasn't the greatest in terms of performance, but it worked.
What do you think made the difference in getting approved?
I actually got rejected about 2 or 3 times at first, but that was due to the nature of the app I was trying to publish rather than the fact that the app was just a web app in a wrapper.
I think the app was designed reasonably well and functioned as I said it would. In general, though, the process of getting into the app store is a real pain.
What kind of app are you trying to publish?
Image hosting control panel app, with upload images directly from camera
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.