Mobile App for Flarum

Wombat

I'm totally lost what the heck do u mean by Mobile App? If the site so great on mobile already, I'm confused.

tarun

Wombat While it looks and works great on mobile, push notifications to get users back to the site is something I want to figure out, especially if its regarding threads they are following.

Afaik, the only way to do push notifications is to have an app on Apple's app store (not sure about Play Store policies) or use intermediary services like boxcar/pushover.

tarun

Thanks for the pointers thecodingwizard. I tried out ionic and was able to embed the demo site and serve it using ionic's built in server.. it looks promising!

I'm stuck on a weird bug where I'm not able to scroll the embedded site's content inside the app. Trying to figure this out at the moment.

tarun

Hey thecodingwizard, how did you link Ionic and Cordova in your comment?

thecodingwizard

tarun Markdown syntax for links: [ LINK LABEL ] ( LINK URL ) except no spaces, so something like
[Ionic](http://www.ionicframework.com and then the closing parenthesis.

tarun

thecodingwizard Thanks!

Felli

tarun Images is basically the same thing just adding a ! at the beginning. lol

tarun

Felli haha thanks for that! 🙂

Cheun

thecodingwizard I was actually looking into Ionic a few weeks ago

tarun

Cheun what did you find?

Franz

brainscript That, and browser-based push notifications will make an app more or less pointless. 🙂

tarun

Franz This is awesome! Any similar solution for iOS?

williamukoh

Franz So when do you hope to get browser-based push notifications implemented?

User39

Franz You could do this for Safari on desktop... that'd be a good use of them. I'm not sure if works without each website having their own developer account setup. But nonetheless, I'd setup one if it meant I could have this work.

Franz

williamukoh Not sure, to be honest. It's not super high on my priority list right now 😉

huobazi

hybird app +1

viet

Just a quick question, would browser based notification be the same as iOS notification? (When users don't have the web page loaded in iOS Safari, would it still bring notification to their phones?)

Franz

viet Not sure whether this would already work on iOS, but that's definitely how it works with Chrome on Android, yes.

dhpaulino

Hey, my friend and I started to develop a mobile app for flarum. We are using ionic and soon we will add the push support 😃.
The app repository - https://github.com/PETComputacaoUFPR/neopet

adasiek

Few additions to this topic as mobile developer:
1. Website is awesome, sure, but it will never replace feeling of a native mobile app. Starting with fullscreen (on my Chrome after pinning to homescreen I am simply redirected to chrome and the page is opened). It's not just push notifications. Touch feedback, response time and a lot of other things are making native app better than some hybrid stuff.
2. Wrapping in Ionic, Cordova and stuff is some kind of solution, but each forum should have it's own icon, etc. There is a lot of problems to solve, not to mention these frameworks have a lot of issues and development is endless.
3. Creating a mobile app isn't only embedding forum in webview, We should also have page to type forum address and some kind of switcher between multiple forums (like teams in slack). Another thing to create and maintain.
4. Creating mobile app is expensive, maintaining app is expensive. I see developing forum alone is expensive enough. And I'm not talking programming only. Each app should have a little different UX, depending on platform. It's a lot of work.
5. Nevertheless, if somebody would like to create mobile app (with UX guidance from Franz or Toby, though), I'm happy to help.