This comes up repeatedly and I’d love to hear some opinions about best advice.
My understanding right now:
There’s the official Discourse app for mobile. It’s actually a hub, it let’s you sign in to various Discourse instances and enables push notifications for those on your mobile device. You’ll browse the actual sites using the mobile web version:
Then there’s an independent iOS app with the same site manager approach, but the forum interfaces are coded natively. It seems to be out of active development, please correct me if I’m wrong:
And there’s an app template approach, that let’s you publish your existing Discourse instance as an app. It’s build with React Native, so works for Android and iOS, but it’s not coded natively. To make that app look like the web version of your instance, you essentially have to design it anew:
So as far as I know there’s no easy mobile app solution for Discourse. You can use the web version, but then won’t have push notifications working; You can use an app that works like a site manager, then you have an additional access step (first install the manager app, then add the forum instance). Or you could offer an app through Lexicon, but that’s quite an extra effort in development.
My understanding is also that any solution that is not wrapping the web view needs to re-engineer all functionality. As Discourse functionality is heavily extended by plugins (e.g. calendar, events, assign, solved) none of this would be present if not specifically coded as well.
My advice so far:
- stick to the web version, also on mobile
- in general, offer a seamless sign-in experience by enabling single-sign-on and simplifying your default sign-up process
- if you have a product-related app already then integrate community notifications in that app (e.g. listen to notifications webhooks).
- if you don’t have an app already, see the first advice and put just a part of your prospective app budget into polishing the web version for mobile
