📱 Create Mobile & Desktop Apps

[robin-macpherson]

Perceived Problem

• After almost a year since launching our public beta, it's become clear that a lot of users simply expect there to be a mobile app for Journaly
• It's also become somewhat clear from watching a lot of reviews of other language-learning products that many people may even view it as a downside to not have mobile apps, saying things like "It's just a website".

Ideas / Proposed Solution(s)

• We've discussed a number of options, such as React Native and Flutter, but have determined that at this time the only option that is feasible and makes sense is Cordova.
• In order to avoid endless backwards-compatibility issues, we don't want to use additional tools to bundle in our static files to the app (necessitating official version updates that people potentially never download)
• Since we're going down this route to create mobile apps, we also think it makes sense to provide an Electron app for desktop

Other Concerns

• We need to look quite carefully into how this impacts our payments flow, since I think being in the iOS App store might mean we'd have to go through them for subscriptions made on Apple devices? I'm not sure how this works on other platforms (Android)

[LindasLinguas]

Question: Would it somehow be possible to create an app that simply acts as a browser and browses you to the website? That way an app could exist without too much development work?