To clarify, it’s just hiring somebody to do the instructions for you - there is a official topic here on how to make your forum into an app, and not everybody can do it.
There’s no need to do this, as Discourse looks fine on mobile. Recreating the app entirely to provide a native app experience would be reinventing the wheel for the sake of doing so.
I believe @nexo and @waffleslop were inquiring basically about a fullscreen webview.
Note that FULLSCREEN flags aren’t possible with Discourse; it breaks the reply system. I inquired in a separate thread, and was told off, saying my idea was stupid. A week after release, hovering at nearly 50k downloads.
I currently have my forum on an iOS and Android app, and used a Webview and WK WebView in Android/iOS respectively.
iOS is a complete mess to deal with, Android was seamless. Both apps together, took about 30 minutes to convert into WebViews.
I did this to create a premium experience for my users, even if it is just tapping a button and opening what is essentially a browser window without a URL bar, it offers a better experience, which is what I wanted.
If anyone is looking for some help DM me, I’ll let you know how I did it.
The app itself (programming) takes 30 minutes tops, the signing for iOS takes hours. Android takes about 15 minutes from scratch.
Would you by any chance be up for writing this up in Meta? My users would be very much up for a webview app. I take on board the points people make about Discourse being a near-app experience anyway, but you are right that some users just can’t conceive of the idea of an ‘app’ unless they have downloaded it from the app store.