this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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That question keeps coming up and I’m pretty sure the answer is no. There are other native apps out there, voyager is and will most likely remain a web app.
It’s also not like you can flip a switch and suddenly it’s native. You’d have to rewrite everything from scratch, so there isn’t really a "we already got this far, let’s make it native" happening here.
I do, however, understand why people keep asking for it. There are some aspects to web apps that just feel a bit off, but I think voyager is doing an amazing job at being a web app.
That's not completely true, with framworks like Cordova you can reuse the JS code for the native app. The thing is, there's no benefit whatsoever.
Personally I think it's good that it's a PWA. It's the first PWA I use regularly on my phone, I only used WhatsApp and Telegram Web on the desktop so far and this is despite me being interested in Tech. If we introduce our friends to Lemmy and show them how easy it is to install a PWA, a lot of people will understand the PWA context a bit more
That's not entirely true of course. A native app allows for certain interaction with the OS that is restricted when it's a PWA.
For example: I doubt the Voyager PWA can interact with Shortcuts on iOS/iPadOS/macOS at all in comparison to some native apps for which the developers integrated Shortcut support.
That said, one of the reasons why I personally like Voyager is that it's cross platform. No more 'What platform are you using?'. One can simply refer to vger.app and be done. Would be even better if you can sign up under Voyager as well.
There’s also a bunch of small interactions that simply don’t feel as nice (on iOS):
There’s probably more of these things, but those are some I keep stumbling across. Maybe some of these can be implemented/fixed, but probably not all.
Okay fair point. I thought the main "web to native conversion" frameworks were wrappers like electron or things like react native that might look familiar to web devs but are still somewhat different. If it’s just a wrapper it strikes me as not really worth it, but if actually native ui comes out at the end and you don’t have to make too many changes that sounds like a decent alternative. Do you happen to know how "native" these apps can be and how much effort it is to convert them?
I forgot it’s a PWA except every time this topic comes up. I seriously can’t tell anymore between this and apollo except config options.
Thanks. It’s definitely one of the best web apps I have ever used.