Creating a Whitelabel Discourse Hub App with Working Notifications for Internally Hosted Discourse

Hello community,

I’ve recently embarked on a project to create a mobile application specifically tailored for our internally hosted Discourse forum. To do this, I forked the Discourse open-source mobile app with the aim of making it work for a single site - ours.

However, I’ve encountered a challenge: notifications are not being received on the mobile app. After delving into some reading, I’ve come to understand that notifications may not work out-of-the-box for internally hosted Discourse instances. This is a crucial feature for our use case, as we want our forum members to stay engaged and promptly respond to discussions.

To address this:

  1. Is there a known workaround or configuration that needs to be done on the server or app side to enable notifications for internally hosted Discourse when accessed through a custom mobile app?

  2. Are there specific services or plugins (like OneSignal or others) that can be integrated to handle the notification mechanism for internally hosted platforms?

  3. In terms of creating a whitelabel Discourse Hub app, are there any guidelines, best practices, or experiences you could share that might ease this process and ensure all features, especially notifications, work seamlessly?

  4. Lastly, are there potential pitfalls or considerations I should be aware of while undertaking this project, especially with future updates to Discourse and compatibility?

Thank you in advance for your assistance. I value the insights and expertise of this community, and any help or guidance will be greatly appreciated.

Warm regards,
Dipendra Sharma

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The Hub is meant for multiple communities.

Use this instead as most of the work you describe is already done:

It will need updating to latest API’s and standards on both iOS and Android.

I have used this base successfully for several clients in the past.

However:

It is definitely not an easy or cheap project, though (including the expense of ongoing maintenance which will be annually significant) and you may be better off just relying on PWA’s now as both Android and iOS support real time notifications natively. I believe Google even support deployment of PWA’s onto their Playstore!

Good luck.

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