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

        Franz This is awesome! Any similar solution for iOS?

          2 months later

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

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

                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?)

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

                    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.

                      15 days later

                      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.

                      a year later
                      4 days later

                      I'm personally just waiting for the API to be stable so I can ready my community for an iOS/Android/Windows Mobile release.