The wait is over! We are excited to announce the DEV Community app for Android. Similar to our approach with iOS, we heavily leveraged native shell/web views and will include more native code over time. There are a few known issues but we're excited to have a starting point for future enhancements!
We're also on Product Hunt today. 😊
Please let us know your feedback and suggestions as you start to try out the app. And just like our web app and iOS app, the Android app is open-source!
Contributions by way of issues and PRs are very very welcomed:
forem
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DEV-Android
DEV Community Android App
DEV Android 💝
This is the official repository for the dev.to's Android app.
Design ethos
DEV Android is an WebView based application. This application is inspired by Basecamp's approach. We will grow to include more native code over time.
By leveraging webviews as much as possible, we can smoothly sync up with our web dev work. And where it makes sense, we can re-implement certain things fully native, or build entirely native features. Life's a journey, not a destination.
Contributions
We expect contributors to abide by our underlying code of conduct. All conversations and discussions on GitHub (issues, pull requests) and across dev.to must be respectful and harassment-free.
System Requirements
You will need to have Android Studio 3.5 or up installed.
Usage
$ ./gradlew tasks --group=custom
------------------------------------------------------------
Tasks runnable from root project
------------------------------------------------------------
Custom tasks
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androidTest - Run android instrumentation tests
hello - Hello World task…
DEV iOS 💖
This is the repo for the dev.to iOS app.
Status:
Released first version, more info: https://twitter.com/bendhalpern/status/1061323718058786822
Design ethos
We will grow to include more native code over time, but for now we are taking the approach of native shell/web views. This approach lost favor early in iOS days, but I believe it is a very valid approach these days. It is inspired by how Basecamp does things. Our tech stack is a bit different, but the ideas are the same.
https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-3-for-ios-hybrid-architecture-afc071589c25
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3743-hybrid-sweet-spot-native-navigation-web-content
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3766-hybrid-how-we-took-basecamp-multi-platform-with-a-tiny-team
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA
By leveraging wkwebviews as much as possible, I think we can make this all pretty awesome and sync up with our web dev work pretty smoothly. And where it makes sense, we can re-implement certain things fully native, or build entirely native features. Life's a journey, not a destination.
Contributing
- Fork and clone the project.
- Build and run the project in XCode.
- …
You can still install the app as PWA and we will continue to support various installation paths of DEV.
Happy Coding ❤️
Oldest comments (91)
@maestromac , thank you for leading up this effort!!
Super excited about this announcement. Awesome job and hat-tip to @maestromac who led the charge here!
We now have apps for Android, iOS, PWAs, and even some (community-built) CLI tools. Of course, all of the above are open-source, and are ready to be improved with the community's help.
Finally! 🥳🥳🥳 I've been waiting for this. Thank you, guys! Keep up the good work!
I'm just sad that I couldn't download it because my phone runs Android 4.1... ☹
Neat! Any advantage to the Android app over the PWA? Been using the PWA for a while now and it's great! Better than most native apps I've used.
Probably the push notification feature would be merged soon 😋😋
Doesn't the native app have push notification feature currently?
It looks like its still in development, see this issue
Congrats! This is so exciting! :D Definitely starring and following the repo. Please let me know if I can ever help. :)
We have more features to implement but we wanted to get this up as soon as it was a solid, usable solution.
Speaking of installable instances of DEV, did you know you can install our site as a desktop PWA? There are some definite gotchas to the current state of desktop PWA but it's an interesting possible future.
what are you finding lacking in current state of PWAs that you need for dev.to?
Specifically for desktop, there are just a few unanswered questions about how certain functionality would be delivered. It's just early and some of the features we might want to use are not yet shipped.
On mobile, especially Android, it's been really nice. But we wanted to get into the native realm because certain APIs may never ship to PWA and getting into native is important to ensure the best longterm user experience.
By mostly relying on webviews, it's not that hard to ship to as many platforms as possible.
Can you show us what APIs ? 🤓
Curious to learn what specific APIs too myself.
I'm all for the iOS, Android apps as options, however, I doubt there's anything that'll be implemented in the natives that isn't supported in the browser at the moment.
The web API support has advanced interestingly.
Anyway kudos to the team behind the platform apps. Enjoying the PWA
The PWA is awesome. I have been using it most of the time on phone. It works pretty well. 😎
Was React Native used to develop the app ? If so, What UI kit was used to give the app the same web ui feel ? This app is really cool like its PWA sibling.
I took a look at the source code on github and it looks like that it's a native Android app, but it uses a webview that contains the website. But I don't know that for sure...
It would be cool if this was developed using React Native. I would want to contribute :)
Is there an API that allows posting on dev.to?
I was not able to figure it out. I was browsing thorough the code for an hour and couldn't figure out how to login using the API.
Is there any beta program one can sign up for??
Just got it! This is exactly what I was looking for! ♥️
Last time I checked the repo there was nothing there, I was planning on working on a poc version and making a PR to open a discussion.
I guess work was being done in private 😉
Congrats on the Android release!
It gives error when you try to login. I tried to login with github, it opens the auth link in browser but when you login on the github, it says csrf error.
Congrats👏🏼🤩 the app is super fast and neat!
I'll check and follow the repo for sure
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