Our company has native apps for iOS and Android. One of our goals is to bring people back to our apps frequently, and to spend a lot of time in our apps. (The app stores seem to prioritize apps that get a lot of usage.) We have a pretty solid Discourse forum, but currently we just link out to the forum’s website from the app. iOS users who want to receive forum push notifications then have to download the Discourse app separately. (Android users can receive push notifications directly from the website, which is great, but in that case, they’re still using the website, and not our app.) We’d like to make the Discourse forum a part of our existing iOS and Android apps, and especially to allow users to receive forum push notifications in our apps, without forcing people to download a separate app or to leave our app to use the forum. (I’m imagining that the implementation would be a web view, much like the Discourse iOS app.) Is there a way to do something like this today? (I’m guessing not?)

I read somewhere that Chrome 72 now support Trusted web activities , which means you can now distribute PWAs in the Google play store. If it works well I think you will have more reason to kill the Android app.

It’s a bit involved, since you need the validation key, paying the Google fee, etc. But it does work.

[image] Lloyd_Lau: If it works well I think you will have more reason to kill the Android app. Let me give one good reason not to: some people do not have a Google account and won’t have one. If the app would be distributed over F-Droid, it would be fine, but forcing people into Google is not a friendly move.

[image] sam: and that we are considering killing the Android app) is cause opening a Chrome Tab is slow compared to PWA, so people prefer the PWA. As long as you ensure that it works with Firefox as well is can also solve [image] hellekin: some people do not have a Google account Discourse as an open source application should always prefer open source solutions

[image] sam: My recommendation here for you @dfabulich is to hold tight for a month or 2 while we redo our protocol and improve documentation. Checking back in on this! What’s the story here?

[image] codinghorror: You could certainly consume the Discourse API in the native apps to grab Discourse notifications. Can you give me a pointer to documentation on this?

This is our current spec: [image] User API keys specification Integrations Discourse contains a system for generating API keys per user if a very specific protocol is followed. This feature facilitates “application” access to Discourse instances without needing to involve moderators. High level description At a high level: Client (desktop app, browser plugin, mobile app) generates a private/public key pair and return url Client redirects to a route on discourse giving discourse its public key Discourse gets approval from user to use app Discourse generat… It could certainly use an improvement or 2 so edits on it totally welcome. Canonical implementation is open source and available at: GitHub - discourse/DiscourseMobile: Discourse Mobile · GitHub

Very curious where this landed. Has anyone been able to embed discourse into their mobile app via webview and take advantage of notifications?

This happens from time to time, we maintain a handful of white labeled apps for customers. Unfortunately the cost though of going down this path is enormous. I would say… consider going down this path if you have say a 20k USD a year budget to build/maintain/debug.

Embed Discourse in a native app?

Development

sam (Sam Saffron) March 5, 2020, 10:38pm 10

Delegated auth is in, and our new login flow is pretty rock solid on the app. The protocols are all open.

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Embed Discourse in a native app?

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