I have a website/web app which I want to make available on mobile devices.
The website is responsive and can be used inthe mobile browser, but I want to make it available on google play / app store. My question is: how could I create a simple app that is actually a browser, which would run natively on the phone but load my web page in full screen?
Any simple solutions or frameworks?
Well there are different approaches to solve your questions I am trying to give you some rough idea with following two approaches.
Easy and simple one
1) Use web views and call home page url that's all.
For better performance.
2) Create a REST apis with only required data for your mobile app . And then use either web view or create your own views and show it to user . In this case if you create your native view then app will perform faster but development will take time.
Related
...
However, you shouldn't develop an
Android app simply as a means to
view your website. Rather, the web
pages you embed in your app should
be designed especially for that
environment.
I was reading this in android documentation. https://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/best-practices
I don't totally understand what the last line means. I know that web view is used to load urls in android activity.
Web view simply loads a url in app. But can it be used in another way. Can anyone explain me what does it mean and how can I do that? Please provide some details.
However, you shouldn't develop an Android app simply as a means to view your website.
If the app is for viewing your website, we can as well use the browser for that.
Rather, the web pages you embed in your app should be designed especially for that environment.
Say there is a terms and conditions screen in your web site that you don't want to develop for mobile apps. This single screen can be loaded on a web view inside your android app.
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.
This is my first time on StackOverflow, so I come with two questions at the same time because they are related :
1 - I have a website that works great on my local server. It is made on Joomla. I heard about the "WebView" thing that iPhone and Android offer and I would like to know if it is possible, still in 2015/2016 to make an app that is basically just a WebView of a website ?
2 - If yes, I saw on old forums (earliest 2014) that Apple rejects WebView apps. Is it still the case nowadays, is there any "tricks" I should know about it ?
Thank you very much
Yes you can make the WebView only app but it should be mobile responsive
No apple don't reject the app with only webview in it but the website should be mobile responsive and you have to fill all other info to approve it(I know because I have few apps with webview only).
I don’t have any knowledge for iOS but I can tell you about android one:
In android devices you can open a web site through 2 different ways, the first one is through web browser and the second one is the one you mentioned web view. Web view is a system component for Android OS that allows your application to display content from the web page directly inside it (the application).
Yes it is still available for Android you can make one.
We make industrial machinery and ship it with Android devices (just like cellphones without the phone) with an installed app that we write to remotely control our equipment from the factory floor.
One customer requested that we interface to some of their equipment which they expose through a web server. I added a feature to our Android code which invokes the native web browser on our device. This works but they want the URL the browser is pointing-to be be hardcoded (or hidden) so their workers can't alter it. Is there a way to do this programmatically from our app?
Alternatively I could use a WebView. When I experimented using WebViews here at our shop on various commercial web pages, getting the scaling correct for any arbitrary web page was problematic. What would I need to know about the customer's web page to make sure a WebView would work with their page?
EDIT: Several responders have suggested a WebView and giving the user the option to manually scale it. The users are factory workers in a production setting, so making them take time to scale would probably not please the customer, and besides they're wearing gloves - all the controls we expose are "fat" buttons - so scaling would be hard. Really this should look right the first time they see it. The customer's production facility is on a LAN on the other side of a firewall in another country so I can't access it from here. Do I need to be able to reproduce it locally do do this right?
In this case, I would definitely use the webview. There's just not going to be a way for you to prevent the native browser from potentially changing URLs.
To handle zooming you could just let the users zoom appropriately for themselves:
webview.getSettings().setBuiltInZoomControls(true);
I don't believe you can block the native browser from accessing other url's, so WebView is your best bet.
About what you need to check, I'd simply check if their website is scaling properly on mobile devices. If it does, it should behave the same in a WebView. Simply visit the website from a mobile phone/tablet or have a look at their page's code.
Providing the ability for the user to zoom as suggested by iismathwizard is an excellent idea as well.
Best of luck ;)
I have created a mobile web application using HTML5,CSS3 and Javascript/Jquery. I've used the PhoneGap Build to get it's apk.
Once people download the app, If I want to add new content to that app so that the user can see the new content, what is the most easiest way to achieve it ?
Is there a way to achieve this without the use of a web service ?
Whatever is the method you suggest, please go a bit in detail. I'm relatively new to dynamic content, have always been involved with static pages.
Also, can I use the Admin page template for my HTML5 mobile app too ?
There is no way to do what you are looking for.
As per your comments, you want to push the dynamic content from YOUR laptop to the user's PhoneGap app. This is not possible as there is no way to establish a connection between user's app and your laptop.
You mentioned, you don't want to use server calls. For me that's the only way.