Be on the home screen as a real icon rather than a link
Load faster because static resources would already be local
Allow for writing a new membic offline
Be more appealing to people who like to have apps for everything
Developing and maintaining a phone app using Apache Cordova has reduced the level of effort required for creating, maintaining, and supporting native phone apps on Android and iOS. However there is still effort involved, requiring additional release engineering, testing, and possibly fees. Meanwhile there is increasing support for web page links added to the home screen. Currently a link to https://membic.org on an Android phone created by selecting "Add to homescreen" off the browser menu creates a reasonable homescreen icon (albeit with an arrow in the lower right), and provides a splashscreen on launch.
I usually launch membic to record a link to something. Occasionally I will launch membic to find a reference. Writing a new membic isn't something that works well offline because of the need to read the existing link for detail info, and the need to actually record the new membic. Offline reference might be useful.
Although it seems like an improvement to get rid of the link indication for the icon on the home screen, if the native app is essentially just a webview then it's really just a link anyway. It seems probable that expectations of how the app should perform might diverge from what is provided, necessitating further native platform development.
On all phone platforms, browsers do aggressive caching of resources. While there will be an initial hit to pull down static resources, it is likely that on subsequent visits those resources will already be available locally.
A native phone app still doesn't seem worth the effort. Opening this issue to provide a place for tracking comments and changes to the technology space.
A native phone app would
Developing and maintaining a phone app using Apache Cordova has reduced the level of effort required for creating, maintaining, and supporting native phone apps on Android and iOS. However there is still effort involved, requiring additional release engineering, testing, and possibly fees. Meanwhile there is increasing support for web page links added to the home screen. Currently a link to https://membic.org on an Android phone created by selecting "Add to homescreen" off the browser menu creates a reasonable homescreen icon (albeit with an arrow in the lower right), and provides a splashscreen on launch.
I usually launch membic to record a link to something. Occasionally I will launch membic to find a reference. Writing a new membic isn't something that works well offline because of the need to read the existing link for detail info, and the need to actually record the new membic. Offline reference might be useful.
Although it seems like an improvement to get rid of the link indication for the icon on the home screen, if the native app is essentially just a webview then it's really just a link anyway. It seems probable that expectations of how the app should perform might diverge from what is provided, necessitating further native platform development.
On all phone platforms, browsers do aggressive caching of resources. While there will be an initial hit to pull down static resources, it is likely that on subsequent visits those resources will already be available locally.
A native phone app still doesn't seem worth the effort. Opening this issue to provide a place for tracking comments and changes to the technology space.