The progressive web app and long term plan for the Cordova app

[Joe Siltberg]

Hi!

I've noticed some work has been done to make fixmystreet into a progressive web app. This seems really great and we'll try to customise it for FixaMinGata before our next release.

It made me curious about mySociety's long term plan for the Cordova app. Will you continue developing and maintaining it? Or will it eventually be retired and replaced by the progressive web app?

Thanks!

- Joe

[Matthew Somerville]

Hi,

Great, thanks :)

Long term plans - we are aware the mobile app lags behind the web
code, especially in some areas (such as asset display).
Even if we did concrete effort to deal with that, it would only
presumably happen again, we don't really have the resource for adding
new features to two separate codebases.
On the other hand, the mobile app does currently allow drafting of
reports offline.
So we would certainly like the website to be able to draft reports
offline and things like that, to add the main feature the app has and
the site does not.
Perhaps also along with research into taking other good bits of the
app - e.g. perhaps the crosshair way of reporting if that proves
easier for all.
We'll be doing some research to see if users would be able to find us
okay if we didn't have any presence in the app stores;
and looking more into what the current policies are around
PWAs/wrappers and the like. So, interesting times :)

ATB,
Matthew

[Jon Kristensen]

Hi! 🙂

torsdag 5 mars 2020 kl. 12:01:54 UTC+1 skrev matthew:

On the other hand, the mobile app does currently allow drafting of
reports offline.
So we would certainly like the website to be able to draft reports
offline and things like that, to add the main feature the app has and
the site does not.
Perhaps also along with research into taking other good bits of the
app - e.g. perhaps the crosshair way of reporting if that proves
easier for all.

Has work started on the functionality to allow drafting of reports online?

Are we tracking website work that needs to be done in order to replace the app somewhere?

 

We'll be doing some research to see if users would be able to find us
okay if we didn't have any presence in the app stores;
and looking more into what the current policies are around
PWAs/wrappers and the like. So, interesting times :)

We're thinking about this as well. Did you start to look into this?

Perhaps something like https://www.pwabuilder.com/ can be used if we need to package the web app for the app stores.

By the way, a quick heads-up to anyone using the app: Google informed last week that existing apps need the Target SDK to be 30 or higher from 1st of November 2022.

Thanks!

All the best,

Jon

[Jon Kristensen]

Speaking of the PWA...

Trying out FixMyStreet 4.0 on https://beta.fixamingata.se/, there seems to be are a couple of issues with the offline functionality.

• The offline banner sometimes shows up as empty on the top of the page (even if num is 0 in offline.js).
• When I shortlisted a report (as admin), there's a crash in staff.se due to an "Uncaught TypeError: fixmystreet.update_list_item_buttons is not a function" error.
• I'm also getting a "$li.find(...)[0] is undefined" crash in offline.js (in getReportsFromList).
• So far, I've only gotten the shortlist page to become cached by visiting it, but perhaps that's a symptom of the problems above.
  

Is there something I have missed when settings up the offline functionality?

https://beta.fixamingata.se/ is running this commit: https://github.com/Sambruk/fixmystreet/tree/6acddf39ea8032a7c5be1fa90492cab3b70d3ffe.

Thanks!

All the best,

Jon