21
votes
What do we think of an app? (iOS and Android)
I was wanting to look into how to make one for this website because I'd like to browse on my phone. We got a lot of tech people here. What do you think?
Edit: I know it's not likely now, but I mean in the future. Is this something we could do when this turns open-source?
Have you tried browsing on your phone, yet? It's amazingly easy browsing on Chrome.
I second this. With how well the site works on mobile, I don't feel like an app is in strong need yet.
OP, if you use iOS, you can add safari bookmarks to your home screen. I've already added a Tildes bookmark to mine.
I'll do that! I just need to bookmark it I guess.
In the Chrome overflow (the three dots to the far right of the address bar) there's an option to “Add to Home screen”, this will —as the name suggests— create a shortcut on your launcher.
Hopefully we'll get Tildes as a PWA, but they've not stated anything about that.
Its SO FAST. Like it continually blows me away. And it makes me mad we could have this everywhere if it weren't for advertising greed.
There are other factors keeping this site fast other than lack of advertising greed...
Right, it's the minimalism of the site keeping it quick more than anything else.
People will probably make Tildes apps if it gets popular, but it's been pretty well stated that there will be no official Tildes app.
I prefer chrome to an app. I'm tired of every site I use wanting me to use a separate app.
I'm currently loving the mobile site, but I definitely could see a place for an app as I can't seem to get Firefox to do a dark theme and it hopefully would enable me to browse without inevitably opening a thousand tabs
You're having trouble with the dark theme on Firefox? I thought it didn't work but I realized I needed to set it for each different browser I use. I do agree that an app would be better for all the tabs though.
I mean for the browser itself. The dark mode for ~ is great and works just fine, I just can't seem to make the menus and UI for the firefox app darker.
Even though the site works wonderfully in Chrome on Android, I'd been considering writing an app just for the exercise.
Don't see the need for an app at this point. The mobile site works great in every browser I've tried. It's fast, easy to use and looks fine.
Once we have a publicly available API, it won't be hard. There's many guides on how to get started with this. The main issue you'd face is what you want the app for, what do you want to achieve with it. Then comes the next part of your sentence:
There's no need for a phone app for this. You'd just be mimicking the website itself in an app, duplicating efforts for no real gain. There's multiple browsers to choose from on your phone, and you can just open the website. A phone app will just require more resources (in terms of storage) and probably be less efficient, since browsers have had a long time with big teams behind them to optimize performance.
Is there anything you'd want from Tildes that you cannot currently get from the website, but would be able to achieve with a phone app?
Actually, quite the opposite. Mobile apps have deep integration with the system. Additionally, you load things into storage ahead of time to not have to pull them down the wire later. A mobile app just has to make the http request to get the data, no extra resources or scripts to download. That's just with a 1:1 feature app, from there you can make additional benefits available to the user (offline syncing, polled message notifications, battery efficient themeing, accessibility, etc). Browsers are actually probably the worst UX for a phone :)
I honestly don't like having so many apps for so many different things. It's nice to just use Chrome to get to what I want, when it works. Tildes works amazingly well so I likely wouldn't use an app. But I'm sure we will have 3rd party apps soon enough.
In the meantime, you can use the Hermit app on Android to create a standalone Tildes browser. It's pretty handy.
I hope so. You can't add a bookmarked site to iPhone afaik, and it's annoying have to click Chrome and type tildes.net. I visit it less often because it's inconvenient.
Click the share icon and then scroll over to Add to Home Screen. Boom.
I don't see it :(
In Safari, not Chrome.
Omg, I never knew about this! Thank you!