Releasing a Open Source Forum App for Discourse

It is certainly possible to wrap the PWA to make it app-store friendly. I can see this being useful for a large site with a big budget, because most users really struggle to get their heads around the whole PWA / not needing an app store dynamic.

I looked into this a while ago, but abandoned it due to:

  1. Significant effort / cost to set it up (US$10,000ish)
  2. Significant effort / cost to maintain it (another US$10,000ish per year).

A lot of this is interaction with and management of the App stores themselves. And there are other issues like Apple / Google wanting a cut of any cash transactions, etc etc.

If you’ve got the expertise available cheaply then perhaps it would be worth it. I’ve chosen to instead just nurture my users through the PWA learning curve!!

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