Question: Do we need a Native (Mobile) App?

[nelsonic]

Many of our (existing/potential) clients still ask us for "Native" (Mobile) Applications.
While we have not pursued Native App projects in the past, we have indirectly ended up working on them as "special requests" for specific clients.

Let's open the discussion on "Native" (Mobile) Apps as a team so we can capture the sentiment.

Todo:

• initial investigation (Blog Post) titled "Do we need a Native (Mobile) App?"
  • What are the costs/benefits of having an app in the Google Play or Apple App Store ?
  • What features are only available in Native (Mobile) Apps vs HTML5+PWA ?
    • Notifications
    • Home-screen Icon
    • Offline-support
    • Reviews/Ratings and "chart position" in the App Store can aid "findability"
• What are the minimum requirements to deploy a "Hello World" app into the app store:
  • Apple App Store
  • Google Play Store
• Investigate our options for developing "Native"
  • "Native Native":
    • Swift (iOS)
    • Java (Android)
  • Phonegap http://phonegap.com/ are people still using it?
    • Does Telerik make it easier? http://www.telerik.com/campaigns/platform/phonegap
    • Or Phonegap Build: https://build.phonegap.com/ (are people using it?)
  • React Native ...? 🤔
• how much can be achieved using "Progressive Web App" (PWA) technologies?
• What are the costs/benefits of using a PWA?
  • Time-to-market (a PWA requires no "store" approval and can be deployed to devices in minutes not hours/days! all subsequent updates are done incrementally without having to download an entire 20mb binary!)
  • How does the add-to-homescreen prompt/button reduce friction to adoption (by not forcing someone to go to an "App Store" and download a 20Mb binary do we have a much better chance of "converting" people to returning users?) 🏠
• What is the timeline for PWA feature availability on iOS? ⌛️

[jackie-scholl]

An argument for Progressive Web Apps: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/ios-doesnt-support-progressive-web-apps-so-what/
It's important to note that at the moment, there's a lot that PWAs cannot do on Safari, including particularly the ability to work offline or install to the home screen.

[sohilpandya]

I am pro swift(native native) at this moment in time, just because I am learning to build native apps and will log the learning process here -> https://github.com/dwyl/learn-apple-watch-development/issues
In terms of the Hello world app, here is the example -> dwyl/learn-apple-watch-development#11. Putting it in production is a whole another process that I haven't yet look at.

PWA or native is a very good question, I feel that we need to look at it on a case by case basis and at times, it's just about teaching our clients about benefits of PWA (as most of them do not need a native app) over native. But there are certain features that are only available on native and if the client wants one of those features, is it better to just go native straight away?

[nelsonic]

https://medium.com/@addyosmani/a-tinder-progressive-web-app-performance-case-study-78919d98ece0