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?)
On Android the story is quite simple, spinning up a Chrome Custom Tab is super easy and it shares authentication with Chrome. Only big downside and reason our Android team members avoid using the Android app (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.
Being Android though you could possibly automate creating the PWA link and all that Jazz from your app which may be interesting.
On iOS the story is more complex due to Apple bugs.
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.
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.