I am trying to figure out if I can scrape an android app in a similar way that I would a website. For example, in scraping a website I might use selenium to control a browser and collect data from the HTML code.
I have downloaded the chrome extension ARC Welder, which as far as I can tell simulates the app. However I cannot figure out how to "control" the app (i.e. press buttons, scroll, collect information such as prices of products).
Can anyone help or point to some useful information? I can't seem to find an answer for this anywhere.
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Can you advise whether there is any way to get the dynamic, visual content from the website in the Android mobile app?
To explain it better – this is what we offer to the customers on computer & mobile device (any of those 2 visual, interactive toursis placed on the website through iframe):
https://itoma.co.uk/our-online-virtual-tours/
Instead of a browser on the mobile - we want to give our customers the same experience in Android app (with extra functionality already there) e.g. imagine this app with this added feature instead of pictures of a building.
Any ideas on how to deliver it please on Android?
Any apps that you'd know that already achieved that so we could check it out please?
I am trying to interact with a website from an android application. More specifically I am trying to login to my online depot and retrieve different data like balances, profit/loss on current day and so on because I don't want to log on to the webpage manually every time I want to see how my stocks are doing. Unfortunately my bank does not have an android app for those purposes.
What I want is an app that automatically retrieves the information from the website and shows it as an notification. So I need to open the website, login with username, password and cookie and then find specific elements (e.g. by css selector).
So far I only achieved something similar with selenium webdriver on windows. Since selenium does not run on android I have to find another solution.
What I have look into so far:
HTMLUnit (not running on android)
HttpURLConnection + JSoup (not sure if this allows me to simulate clicks on specific buttons...)
Robotium (can it only be used for testing apps or also for my purposes?)
Are there alternatives? Can this be achieved with one of the listed tools?
Any ideas are appreciated. Cheers!
I have been playing around with PhoneGap for a little while, and getting it set up to work correctly with Google Drive API is proving to be far more difficult than setting up a website which does the same.
I am wondering if it would be more to my advantage to cease trying to make the full app work with phonegap, and instead use phonegap to access a hosted site.
Note that I do not wish to open the site in the default browser. The goal would be to make it appear to be an application (no borders, url, back button, etc), but have the web server handle everything behind the scenes.
I know PhoneGap has an In-App-Browser available. Is this something that is possible with it? Or does it only function for more limited use?
Thanks
You can definitely use a WebView for your app, which display the webpage but give you the ability to control the layout around it. Running a WebView instead of native code may cost some performance but it's doable.
The company I work for is exploring creating "an app" version of their online video delivery webapp. The webapp is HTML5 and streams video. Nothing too scary but a lot of the stuff is server-side authentication with third party video hosts, code that will never be in a mobile app for security reasons.
The webapp has a lovely mobile stylesheet that works fine. We want an app that:
Shows a quick splash screen (and even that's optional)
Load the existing mobile website (not include it within the app)
And have the ability to specify an icon, give it a name and then shove it in the relevant marketplaces. That should satisfy the marketing department and it means I stay in control of what the app actually does.
Yeah, it's possibly the laziest app development ever... But, what's the simplest way to generate something like this? I was imagining there might be something out there already where you feed it your starting URL, splash screen, icon and name and it hands you back a multi-platform app.
Note: I'm not looking for something to create an app that looks like the mobile website and I'm not looking to put the content of the mobile website inside the app, I essentially just want a browser that loads the real mobile site.
Have a look at https://www.shoutem.com/. They provide a service similar to what you seem to be looking for but they charge royally for it. Considering the extra features you can easily add with their service your marketing department might just smell profit from using it and may therefore happily sign it off with their well known satanic smile.
There are a number of websites which provide easy web app development for a website. One of the famous is App Maker . Others include:http://www.viziapps.com/ and http://ibuildapp.com/
Since posting this, I have found:
http://www.websitetoapp.net/create
Feed it a URL and an Icon and it'll give you an Android app. Pay $5 and they'll disable adverts. Seems like it might be perfect for the Android half of this project.
Now, is there anything out there that will do this for other platforms?
I am using phone gap to program an android app and I want one page on the app that is updated daily with news and information.
I have a few ideas and have tried a few solutions mainly just linking to a website where I am hosting a page that I update.
Does anyone have any better, more built-in solutions?
Have you considered an RSS feed (or several)? There are plenty of examples of basic RSS readers in Phonegap. This one, http://www.raymondcamden.com/index.cfm/2011/10/11/PhoneGap-RSS-Reader could be a good start.