I am a .NET guy, so I am developing apps for WP7.
On Windows marketplace, they do not approve applications if it only opens a
WebBrowser control and a mobile website in it. You have to write main functionality with Silverlight, C# and XAML.
For android I just want to use m.myapplication.com in a WebView control,
so as soon as you will open app it will show that url to you.
Will this application be OK for android market? Or will they require me to write
java code to fill the content?
P.S: I also wonder is there any basic android template that I can take for eclipse, and fill url for my mobile website, and it will run on my phone?
There is no "review" process for any apps that get uploaded to the market (other than checking to see that they are signed with a valid release key)
So yes you will be allowed to upload your app to the market. Even if it is just a webview pointing to a mobile site.
I know of no such template, but that doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. if you search around online for things like "Android WebView example" and have worked your way through the Hello World tutorial you should be able to implement your webview without too much hassle.
Related
I have a mobile website, users user smart phone browser to access my site.
Now some users would like to have an Android App.
So is there any easy and fast way to create an Android App which will access the existing mobile website so that I can have an Android App without developing Android app?
You would have to create a "wrapper" Android App. That is a native Android App with a Main Activity that contains a WebView with JavaScript enabled and some sort of navigation controls either on the mobile website or the native app (buttons or menu) but you could bump into problems such as:
Users being stuck in a particular page with no way to navigating back or forward.
Google is now more picky with the apps and they have policies to reject or ban apps that are only wrappers or point to external websites (kind of what Apple did for iOS)
Any case, you would have to create a mobile layout for your website or a make it responsive (special CSS and JS UI/UX that fits better on mobile devices).
Another alternative is to make your website compatible with PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS (https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/) which is basically a Web app with some special elements that allow it to receive push notifications, put a shortcut or app icon on the device's home screen, etc.
Good luck! Hope this helped!
You can use android WebView. For more details you go through the link Android Webview
the only way to do that, using WebView on your apps or you need to create manually
You can put your code into Cordova and convert it into other IDE like android studio or eclipse .
reference:
Import Cordova project in Android Studio
I have customers wanting my website in app form, but the website is responsive. I've been looking for an open source project or code to just run the website in an app or open up their default browser to direct them to it. They just want the button.
Is there an open source project to make it easy to develop that code for iOS, Android, etc.
Are there any issues with running a website natively? Aka, same as cross-browser issues or..?
Thanks!
There is Apache-Cordova at this link. It is multi-platform and free/opensource.
In Android, you can use WebView.
Android WebView is a system component powered by Chrome that allows Android apps to display web content.
For more information about Android WebView, please visit the documentation
Can a custom FB web app be used inside the iOS / android FB apps? Docs are not very clear on that. You can create Bookmarks for native apps, but I want to have a bookmark pointing to our custom FB web app canvas. The goal is to develop an app that's usable on all platforms.
I've been making some test and I could'n execute a non native app from facebook app or web page, and it's not easy to load facebook web page in PC mode from a mobile device.
The official Facebook documentation for iOS says:
When a user does a search in the Facebook app your app will be visible if it passes a usage threshold. The search results will display apps that have been configured for SSO support. When the user selects your app from the search results they will be directed to your app. If the user had previously authorized your app they will be authenticated when your app is launched.
I guess that for Android will be pretty like this. So if you develop a native app that only shows a WebView pointint to your web (pretty simple by the way in iOS and android) must work with no problems.
Usually Facebook APPs are on Flash, so I don't think that it will work on iOS (Please correct me if I'm wrong with the Flash issue).
On Android, it would be extremely easy, having in mind it works with Flash with 0 problems. You'd just have to implement a WebView on your layout and point to the url of your facebook app.
In general, you can really create applications that work on both systems, iOS and Android, playing with the webView's. However, you have to know that they will never work as if they were written on native code in terms of performance.
From what I've seen, if a developer already has an existing mobile version of their app which is also on Facebook, they are able to create a tab for it that will appear on Facebook for iOS and Facebook for Android. I don't think you can create a bookmark to the webapp version to be seen on a mobile phone. Users can of course bookmark your webapp on their browsers, though.
I have a fully-working web app that is accessible using Android's browser.
The annoying part is the url bar uses a lot of the screen. Is there a way to make this web app a native Android app? I've read that webview can be used to embed a web site within the Android App.
Unfortunately, I only know web programming languages and have no Java experience. Will I still be able to do this on my own?
You certainly will need some learning in java, you can start with reading the following :
Webview documentation
A very detailled tutorial (quite hard if you haven't any java basics)
A basic tutorial on webview usage.
Have you looked at phonegap. It comes with a standalone app with a WebView embedded in it and with native android functionality support. You just need to provide your html/javascript app to it and you're done.
You can use a web app called MIT App Inventor
and get it done in less than 10 minutes, it's very easy, intuitive and requires no programming skills at all.
all you need to do is create a new project,
drag and drop a WebViewer component, on the right set the home url,
and your done! just connect to an android phone via USB to install the app
and you can even download the .apk to your computer, sign it and publish it on Google Play
BackGround:
There are Facebook APIs(and SDKs) available to develop applications for other Mobile devices like iPhone, BlackBerry etc, but it seems there are no official ones for Android(?).
People have ported Java APIs to work on Android and have written FaceBook Client applications(FaceBook dev: Wiki Page). Apparently, there is also a light weight FaceBook SDK in alpha release for Android(a la FBRocket). But it is not avised to be used in Production.
Since these FaceBook functionalities have been exposed as REST based service, most of work would invove sending requests in desired format over Http. So, writing a FaceBook client app for Android certainly is doable.There are similar applications already in market e.g.: Bloo.
Questions:
When asked to write a FaceBook client application what approach should one undertake? Should we choose the SDK or invoke the services over Http?
If there is already a Web application that integrates with FaceBook, can we just browse to that Application from inside a WebView and be done with this?
Thanks!
I would use the Java APIs. You mention they were "ported" but were they? You develop Android apps in Java, you can often just include .jar files and use them in your Android app without any sort of "porting". REST access to FaceBook would also work fine too.
Are you talking about a custom application that you've built on top of FaceBook? If you already have a webapp that works fine in the Android browser then it would be fine to just have your users go to that site by giving them the URL. If the WebApp is only part of your application then you could pop open the browser with that page open, or you could load that page in a WebView as part of your larger application. However if this is all your application is doing, then it's not really an application, it's just a glorified browser bookmark and I would strongly recommend against releasing an app like that to the Android Market unless you like getting horrible ratings.