Beginners help wanted!

[tombirmingham]

Hi,

I have what might seem like basic question.... I have a mobile responsive website and was considering getting an app for our company, but I've heard you can get a 'gateway' app, which basically just embeds your website into an app, so the users would still have an app logo on their home screen, but when they click on it they are basically just taken to your website.

Does anyone know if this is actually possible? or the proper name for it?

 

[RumoredNow]

the proper name for it?

Web Wrapper.

Sorry, I don't know the how.

 

[jesmanczyk]

There's Ionic framework as an example.

 

[Mark Kaplan]

Yep, you just create a web wrapper app.

 

[hopmedic]

I'm leaning more toward Progressive Web Apps. I created a couple of Windows Phone apps back in the 7.0, 7.5, 8.0, and 8.1 days. The most used one was for Weight Watchers, and after 8.0, I was no longer on WW, so I didn't update the app beyond that. I created the apps I did, just to teach myself C#.

Now that I'm on Android, I thought about whether I should learn to do Android dev in Xamarin (so as to cover Windows and Android together), but with all the talk about progressive web apps lately, I don't think I'm going to bother with Xamarin. Sure, I think there will still be a place for it, but I've been teaching myself web dev, so it's a shorter stretch to go to PWA than it is to go to Xamarin for native development, I think. With that in mind, my suggestion would be not to bother with a web wrapper app, but to take the existing site and add the functionality to make it a PWA.

 

[Mark Kaplan]

Personally I really dislike web wrapper apps. They are nothing more than a bookmark to me.