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 originally asked this question because I wanted to retain users in my app, because I think Apple and Google will send free traffic my way. Is this task any easier (or harder?) in a “Chrome Custom Tab” for Android? Is it plausible that y’all would offer a library for iOS that wraps a WKWebView and solve this problem for us? (It seems like you’ve already handled 90%+ of the work by implementing Discourse Hub.)

[image] Dan Fabulich: Is this task any easier (or harder?) in a “Chrome Custom Tab” for Android? I would say Android is “different” hard. Especially since the OS itself is not providing the primitives. Very hard to justify effort there when the PWA is just so good on Android. We use React Native and components for wrapping WKWebView. The complexity remains sadly. React native updates can also be quite painful to work through from history.

@sam my justification for embarking on this is really around push notifications, and also because I have an existing app that would easily allow my members to do multiple things in the same place (study for their exam, chat in the community, shop, etc.). But, it sounds like I could have them add the community app as a PWA, and they could get push notifications and updates? Would the PWA have push notifications? Update: found answer here, looks like does not support push notifications. I’m looking into the PWA option further - perhaps I could even add a link to “Join the Community discussion” into my existing native app, and that would be the correct link to download the PWA? Thanks! James

iOS does not have web push notifications, not even for PWA’s, hence the existence of services like One Signal. Android does not have this issue. Aside from that, apps do provide a marketing presence in the app store which is attractive to some organisations and businesses. It’s worth noting that the Windows Store now accepts submissions of PWA’s.

How about just integrating community notifications on an existing native app? And link them to the default mobile web view of the community?

I see your intentions here, it makes sense to want to integrate a webview of a Discourse forum in an existing app. I’ve seen this done in a few apps and if you have experienced mobile app developers it’s not an impossible task. Your challenges will be around: authentication, some identity providers (e.g. Google), do not allow authentication in a webview, period. And it’s tricky to sync sessions between your native app and the webview push notifications: you need to hook up your Discourse notifications to an APNS server somewhere, you can do this via web hooks, a custom Discourse plugin or a third party (OneSignal, Amazon SNS, etc.) And as Sam noted above, there will be little details and maintenance issues that will creep up over time.

Thank you so much @pmusaraj :slight_smile: That is extremely helpful. I agree that the authentication and notifications seem to be the biggest challenges - but I’m going to go for it! I will keep folks posted. It makes sense that Discourse as a whole wants to be cautious with this, because a company requires dev resources and it is not “out of the box”. But I think in my case I can get it done!

If you do wind up working on this, I think it’ll help a lot to make this an open-source library, so that other devs can help share the load of maintenance.

Great idea. I’ve really been looking for a place to contribute to the community, and this could be perfect!!

Hi, Just confirming, isn’t the GitHub - discourse/DiscourseMobile: Discourse Mobile · GitHub repo the Discourse Hub app? I’m not sure if things have changed, but is the GitHub - pmusaraj/discourse-mobile-single-site-app: Single-site app wrapper for a Discourse site. Supports Push Notifications via OneSignal. · GitHub repo still the “template” for a white label single site app?

Embed Discourse in a native app?

Development

harithwick (Harith Wickramasingha) April 3, 2024, 9:50pm 38

I got rejected multiple times by Apple when trying to submit an app with a Discourse community. It seems to break their design guidelines. Has anyone managed to get around this issue?

Topic		Replies	Views
What's the best advice for native app requests? Feature	8	2726	April 9, 2022
Discourse as Android Application Feature	73	19960	September 20, 2016
Discourse forum owners: Are you interested in native mobile apps? Marketplace	39	7462	September 8, 2019
iOS Mobile App Notifications Product Support	53	10362	June 7, 2022
Looking to hire an app developer for native Discourse Marketplace	6	1871	January 7, 2018

Embed Discourse in a native app?

Related topics