Shiny on Mobile

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Amber James

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Jul 29, 2015, 9:59:12 PM7/29/15
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I am looking to start a new project soon but I am not much of a front-end web developer. The application would mostly be on mobile. Is it possible to do this on shiny? Are there any current tutorials or examples. I looked online and saw some faqs that said it would be possible but I have yet to find any substantial evidence that people have done so. 

Thanks,

Amber 

Dean Attali

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Jul 30, 2015, 2:14:23 PM7/30/15
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Bootstrap (which is the UI library that powers shiny) is built with mobile in mind, so I think you can just go ahead and make your app , a lot of mobile-friendly features exist already. The fluidity of rows, the collapsibility of navbars, stuff like that.  I built a few simple shiny apps that I made sure work well on mobile too, and there wasn't too much to edit.  If you want to support both mobile and desktop, maybe consider adding some mobile-only CSS, but that's only if you really require the UI to be different (for example, if you want less spacing or smaller font on mobile)

If you're using Chrome to test, there's a really handy feature in the Developer Toolbar (you can reach it with the F12 key on Windows): if you click on the icon of a cellphone near the top-left of the toolbar, your browser will emulate a mobile browser, so you can see how your app will look.

Amber James

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Jul 30, 2015, 8:09:38 PM7/30/15
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Would you happen to know if there is a "deploy to mobile" feature so that you can place the application on the google play store? Or, would I have to set the application up on a server and just let the user render everything with their mobile browser?   

I apologize for the silly questions. I just don't know anything about this side of development. I have always made stand-alone windows applications. After attempting to research this kind of development I am finding my head spinning because of all the many different programming languages and options for both "front-end" and "back-end" application design for android applications or web applications. 

Thanks again,

Amber 

Dean Attali

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Jul 30, 2015, 8:20:58 PM7/30/15
to Amber James, Shiny - Web Framework for R

Hm that I don't know anything about, I doubt such a feature exists. To be honest, it sounds a bit weird to me to have a shiny app act as a mobile app, I think mobile apps usually have their own native UI. I thought you meant that you want the app to ve mobile browser friendly.  Let's see if anyone has a better answer

Winston Chang

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Jul 31, 2015, 5:00:09 PM7/31/15
to Dean Attali, Amber James, Shiny - Web Framework for R
Sorry, there isn't really a way to deploy a Shiny app as a native app in the iOS or Android app store. As Dean said, Shiny apps will work as mobile web pages. I think there are apps out there that essentially show a web page as an app, so perhaps something like that could be done with a Shiny app, but that's the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

-Winston


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Amber James

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Aug 3, 2015, 9:54:34 PM8/3/15
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Ok. Thank you for your help ! I will attempt to see if I can find a different language or workaround so that I can use shiny and R for mobile. 

-Amber

Dean Attali

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Aug 14, 2015, 11:22:26 PM8/14/15
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You might be interested in this thread

PhoneGap can be used to turn an html page into a "native app" http://phonegap.com/

Hossein Lotfi

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Dec 22, 2016, 2:10:33 PM12/22/16
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I have the same problem, I am looking for interacting between mobile app and shiny server. 
At the moment I have found simple way to access shiny app in mobile app using Cordova webview. but this way have some problems such as loading speed.
Would you please let me know if you could find any solution to interact between mobile app and shiny server?

Thank you for your consideration.
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