Polymer as a replacement for Android Apps

[Darin Hensley]

I read somewhere that Polymer is intended to replace android applications down the road. I think this is an excellent idea, if indeed it is true. However, I was wondering and also wondering if the answers could be done currently:

1) How would the user have a icon shortcut for a polymer website on their screen? Is there some kind of api already that the user could press that would install the shortcut from Polymer?

2) How would a person place their polymer web app on the Google play since they are url based?

[Max]

On Wed, 22 Jul 2015 at 19:14 Darin Hensley <darin....@gmail.com> wrote:

I read somewhere that Polymer is intended to replace android applications down the road. I think this is an excellent idea, if indeed it is true. However, I was wondering and also wondering if the answers could be done currently:

1) How would the user have a icon shortcut for a polymer website on their screen? Is there some kind of api already that the user could press that would install the shortcut from Polymer?

In the chrome browser there is an "Add to homescreen" button, so the user can add web apps to the homescreen easily enough. I use this for Facebook since I prefer their web app to their android app.
There are probably some 'gotchas' to this though - one I have noticed is that it isn't as easy to 'share' a photo (for example) with the web app as with the android app. Perhaps there's a way around that of which I am unaware.

 

2) How would a person place their polymer web app on the Google play since they are url based?

It's pretty common, I think, to have apps that are purely links to web sites, and so that would presumably work for web apps too. I guess that is how the chrome app makes homescreen shortcuts.

However, you can also make apps using polymer that are akin to their native brethren, and it's pretty easy to do :

<https://crosswalk-project.org/>

This creates a simple java shell that opens a webview for an html file that is in your app. All the files are packaged together, and they can be uploaded to the Google Play store. There is even a project that targets iOS (I've no experience with that though, but I imagine it uses the webview provided on the iOS platform, rather than providing its own).

Max.

 

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[owe...@google.com]

For getting the icon on the user's screen there is an API that allows sites to show a banner encouraging users to do just that: http://updates.html5rocks.com/2015/03/increasing-engagement-with-app-install-banners-in-chrome-for-android