What do you think about mobile app for DEV.to ?

I like React Native and i can write that app.
What do you think about this?

Comments

[Jake Varness]

The PWA is great. Not sure I need a native mobile app

[Ben Halpern]

In addition to my comment, this is definitely part of the overall situation. We're wrapping our head around it all, but either way we are definitely leaning on improving any existing code as opposed to spreading our dev process to thin.

[rhymes]

@ben this might help a bit but you've probably already seen this post

I read it and it looks like a lot of work to get it right in all possible situations and also cross platform :D

Progressive Web Apps on iOS are here 🚀

[Pavol Rajzak]

When I saw that dev.to has this fantastic PWA solution I was like "finally there's a website that does not force users to use some native application without any added functionality" (Yes, I am looking at you linked.in).

I don't see what would be the added value of such an application.*

(*edit: at current state...)

[Ben Halpern]

Yes, I am looking at you linked.in

LinkedIn is a pretty good counter-example for pretty much every good practice.

[Sergey Gustun]

Hi, yes Linkedin nice workplace, but i from Russia :(

And Linkedin at us blocked.

But here my 'pet project' in React Native.

iOS:
goo.gl/XeBk5B

Android:
goo.gl/FkZLig

[Ben Halpern]

It's on the roadmap, but has not become a priority. Here are where we stand on this issue as far as I'm concerned.

We don't really have the internal resources to go to far in this direction at the moment. Of course we're always trying to grow as an organization to get to that point—aka revenue—but internally we're not there yet.

Of course it might be possible to open up a public API and others can build clients, but I'm sure that will also be somewhat of a burden we don't currently have a lot of bandwidth for.

We are on the path to open source, at which point we can kick off this project and get the right contributions. Still not sure exactly when that will happen though.

We are accepting some folks into the internal project to try to get moving on that front. If anyone is super motivated to kick off this project with us I can extend an invite. Here is the form, mention specifically working on iOS or Android and we can have the conversation.

But with regards to how that would go down, initially I really feel like the approach to this should be done in a similar fashion to how Basecamp builds for mobile. It perhaps doesn't provide the most powerful experience off the bat but could be ground to build on top of.

Here are a couple posts on that topic and I think everything argued there in terms of re-using code and managing releases etc. is relevant to our current situation. And we can build from there. I think people tend to make a quick leap to other approaches, but this one jives for me.

m.signalvnoise.com/hybrid-developm...
m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-3-for-...

Would happily field disagreements on this approach, but let's start from there.

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Okay so that's everything I can say on this subject. Would certainly be supportive of anyone who wants to lend a hand to make it happen at this point. It's been sitting in the will we, won't we bucket for a while but I feel like we have some clarity that this is not currently a big priority, but happy to support willing volunteers to take the lead on building this as an open source project—as long as we can agree on a sensible approach.