Flutter Mobile App for your Discourse Community

Dev
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Hey everyone, I’ve been working on a Flutter mobile app for my discourse community for the past 3-4 months. Was wondering if anyone else is interested in using Flutter to build a mobile application for their Discourse Community.

Ask me any questions below. :slight_smile:

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@harithwick I am interested in the Flutter app. Is it open source, I would love to contribute. I am interested in creating a flutter plugin to make it easy to add Discourse to apps.

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I’d like to have more information about that.

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It would be great to see more development on this. I’m curious why there isn’t a native app. Developers could create one and monetize it, either with a one-time purchase or a subscription. I’d be willing to pay for either option. Simple tasks, like saving an image posted on forums, are incredibly difficult on iOS Safari.

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But there is?

But:

  • Discourse is already a PWA so the benefits are minimal?
    • Once Apple chooses to fix its support for web notifications then there surely will be few advantages? (In the meantime buy Android!)
  • Are you prepared to pay for the significant additional maintenance? We’re talking ~$10k a year of developer time and a lot more if you want to keep it very rich and native whilst keeping up with the evolution of the web product. Who’s going to pay you, how can you justify the time and expense and how will you monetize?
  • “Truly native apps” can’t leverage most plugins and theme components
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Really, how? I’m just wondering because I’m doing that almost daily basis without any hazzles.

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Thanks for the links, Robert. I’ll check out Lexicon.

I was intentional in not equating PWAs with native apps. While PWAs offer great flexibility, they don’t match the performance and functionality of natively compiled code.

Regarding plugins, you make a good point. My focus is more on achieving the best vanilla functionality and performance. I’d be curious about the percentage of vanilla Discourse instances versus those with plugins. For mobile, I’m just asking for vanilla.

Regarding costs, I agree. That’s why I’m willing to support a fixed fee or subscription model. I would support the Discourse developers making it closed source to monetize their work, etc.

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The issue here is that such group is still way too small. But sure, I may be wrong too, it happends every now and then :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: But out there isn’t that many forums where userbase is that massive there users would be willing to pay anyway. People just don’t want to buy an app to get support.

And I’m quite sure if there would be a real opportunity to make revenue someone would builded a native Discourse-app already.

For me as a microlevel forum admin I would like to see such app. On my area PWA is just too difficult start to use for ordinary phone users, and DiscourseHub is even more harder — for reasons I don’t totally understand, but mainly because it is in English I guess. Most of finnish can enough English, but still the barrier is way too high — yet they can use other English speaking apps without any troubles. But I claim that this is question in Spanish/Portugese world, Italy, France, even in German speaking Europe.

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This is happening on iOS (I haven’t tried it on Android yet).

When I try to hold down on an image to save it, the image just goes full screen and the UI disappears. I don’t know how to go back, so I end up killing the app and starting over. There’s a download function, but it also just makes the image go full screen and the UI disappears again. Clicking the button download does not download the image (at least it doesn’t show up in recents).

On Android, there’s a hardware and OS back button. With Apple, you have to swipe, but swiping doesn’t work in this situation.

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It may be best to create a separate topic for that specific issue. :+1:

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