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Ask HN: Turning an existing mobile site into an app

5 points by eli ↗ HN
Greetings HNers,

My startup is Industry Dive and we provide B2B news and intelligence for your phone.

We do this in a couple of ways, but the main one is JQuery Mobile-based websites (pull up www.educationdive.com or www.utilitydive.com on your phone to see). I'd like to package the sites for the app store -- not because we need any native features, but to satisfy people who expect all mobile products to be discoverable through the app store.

This seems like a no brainer for PhoneGap: we've already got a mobile UI designed and built, the mechanics of the site are very simple, and we don't need any native APIs. However, I've gotten wildly different estimates for how much work it will take to use PhoneGap and what the quality of the end product will be.

I think my next step is to build a PhoneGap proof of concept to see how it works on a real device, but my gut says the right answer is some sort of hybrid approach, where some UI elements are native, but most dynamic content is loaded via API into a WebView. It just stinks to recreate a UI that already works well enough in a mobile browser.

I'd be grateful for any pointers, especially personal experience with creating an information-centric app from an existing mobile site.

3 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 9.5 ms ] thread
andrewmunsell
Don't bother recreating the app with any native features unless you really need to. Having said that, I have also found that PhoneGap is extremely buggy with jQuery Mobile and nested lists (the back button didn't actually work, like it wasn't keeping a history). No guarantees it wasn't my/the other developer's fault (some other developer gave me the JQuery Mobile code) and I also can't say if it is a bug in JQuery Mobile or PhoneGap or if it extended past nested lists. I just rewrote the app using a native ObjC.

I'd personally just go with a native ObjC app that has one WebView pointing to your website and some sort of mechanism for detecting if the internet is offline and displaying a message. Or use the caching manifest on your site.

eli
I thought PhoneGap basically was an ObjC app with a webview pointing at the site, no?

I definitely don't need any native elements. I would love to have the app be exactly the same as the site, provided the performance is reasonable.

(And you may already know this, but the caching manifest has quirky rules; it's harder than it should be to use on a real site.)