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Help test the DEV beta app!

Jess Lee on October 25, 2018

To all the iOS users out there: we'd love your help testing the DEV beta app. None of us on the core team are mobile experts but, with the help fro...
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Ben Halpern

To anybody curious: The Android app will follow. iOS got prioritized due to Apple's crappy support for PWA. 🙃

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rhymes

A question: is the app "wrapping" the PWA? If I'm not mistaken the API is not out in the wild so I guess you're using "web views" or something like that. Would love to read an article about how you and the contributors built it.

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Ben Halpern

Great idea for a post. The repo contains the gist of the approach but I could definitely walk through the process.

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Jannis Jorre

Personally I prefer an optimized PWA over installing a native app on Android, but I guess there's still enough people who want to use Apps...

(Android should just simply support setting a default PWA Browser which is different to the default browser.. When Chrome Canary is broken, it's really annoying that my PWAs also don't work..)

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Vedran Mandić

I wonder how many regular users are aware of PWAs at all.

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Gareth Bradley

I'm loving the PWA on android. Using Edge for Android and have it pinned to my homepage. Notifications don't come through though.

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K

Why not Expo? ;)

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Shashi

haha..thanks. Good to know the poorer section of the globe who arent IOS also have hope!

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Ali Spittel • Edited

Omg! Just moved to iPhone! Perfect timing!

Edit: This is incredible, but as a Python dev can we move to self.DEV instead of DEV.self 😂 (jk)

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Jess Lee

Ahh I’m thinking about switching too! How’s the transition?

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Fran González • Edited

I switched last December after being in Android my whole life and it was a little bit strange in the beginning, but totally worth it. It also plays very nicely with other Apple devices, if you have any!

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rhymes • Edited

me too! can we do a support group? :D

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Ali Spittel

It's a little weird -- a lot of the gestures are different. It's an awesome, awesome phone though. The camera is excellent and it looks really nice!

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Shi Ling

Hm... But why make a mobile app / PWA? Dev.to works perfectly fine in the mobile browser. I added dev.to to my home screen from my Android's google chrome (it has it's special spot in my reading folder). Pretty sure you can do that on iPhone too. Unless there's a need for native mobile capabilities, I don't think the overhead costs of managing two more mobile projects is worth it?

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Meghan (she/her)

iPhone does support it (I use it myself) but the support is not great. Clicking on links opens the tab in the PWA window, and if you close the PWA and then come back to it, it will refresh the "app" and go back to /. While I don't think I'll download the app because the drawbacks aren't enough for me to be that upset with the experience, but native apps are still very necessary for that "real mobile" experience on ios. Mobile safari also doesn't support notifications etc.

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Shi Ling

Ah, I see what you mean. That's pretty annoying. Had that issue before when I added Quora to the home screen (gave up and installed the mobile app). But so far, hadn't had any issues doing this for dev.to :D.

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Ben Halpern • Edited

Yeah, this is it. Native true-believers may be disappointed that the app will still largely be web/browser-driven.

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Michiel Hendriks • Edited

I wish more screen estate was dedicated to the article. The social bar should maybe be part of the top toolbar?

PS. posting a screenshot via the app was a bit complicated. Pasting the URL from the small edit field and then writing the markdown for it.

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Robin Kretzschmar

I just like the PWA as android user but the benefit of an app is more popularity due to the fact that the logo can be seen on the app stores (android and ios) and therefore possibly will attract more users.

Just my 2 cents :-)

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jess unrein

Loving the app so far except for one thing - when I try to upload an image in a comment, I’m unable to actually target and then copy the resulting url. A button to automatically copy the url to your clipboard would be fantastic!

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Jess Lee

Cool, I created an issue 😇

Improve Image Upload & Copy/Paste #81

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. From a comment on dev.to:

when I try to upload an image in a comment, I’m unable to actually target and then copy the resulting url.

Describe the solution you'd like

A button to automatically copy the url to your clipboard would be fantastic!

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Martin Mungai

Testflight link is broken guys

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Jess Lee

@mungaiandela and @joppedc are you still getting an error?

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JoppeDC

Nope working now and replying with the app 😉

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Florimond Manca

Installed — looks brilliant! Well done.

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Sanjeev Kumar

On it!!!

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Robert Cooper

Downloaded and posting this comment from the mobile app ⚡️

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Иван Плесских • Edited

I done dev.to android app half year ago. It's just simple webview, but works nice. I even wrote email to dev.to support about it, but there is no answer.
thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i...

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Tinashe Kupfuwa

Good day

How do I get the Redeem Code for use with test flight?

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Rattanak Chea

I installed test flight app, and open the link above in safari.

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Tinashe Kupfuwa

Thank Youuuuuu!!!!!

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Pablo Martí

Awesome! Will take a look soon!

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Hunter Parks

Working pretty well on the iPhone XS! Now I’ll have to be careful about spending too much more time on DEV!

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JoppeDC

Sadly, the testflight url gives me an internal server error :(

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sndrx

Finally! I was waiting for this. The app looks great so far. I'm posting this comment from the app itself. It's all nice and dandy, haha.

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Jen

Would you be be open to starting a gitter/discord/slack for bug reporting and convos regarding contributing? @ben , @jess ?

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Jess Lee

Hey Jen! I can add you to our iOS group on DEV Connect :)
We try and consolidate all bug reports on the iOS repo -- github.com/thepracticaldev/DEV-ios

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Jen

Ace, thanks! 🤘

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rhymes • Edited

Wish I had an iPhone around.

Today I went to the Apple Store to checkout the iPhone XR and see its size but I was one day early. Maybe I can "testflight" the app on one of those in the store :D

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Ender Ahmet Yurt

hello from dev ios app ✌️😘😎

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Erwan ROUSSEL

I want this app 😍

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Mattia Astorino

I don’t see the notifications badge on the app icon even when i have unread notifications.

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RupankarGhosh

I am using dev.to web app in android for some time and it works quite well. There is a wrapper on playstore but it's not good . Hope the native Android app will come soon.❤️

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Sethu Senthil

Why not flutter?

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Jason Walzak

At first glance it’s very nice so far.
Wouldn’t mind seeing password manager support but that isn’t really priority.

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Rafal Pienkowski

I’m in :)

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Suri Nuthalapati

Installed :)

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ajfausto@home:~#

Hmm I get the started screen on every bottom tab :(

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Rattanak Chea

I wrote this comment from the mobile app. So far so good.

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Francis Provost

Timing it perfectly with the Xr release 👌

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ArcCosine • Edited

At first loading,dev.self is very heavy:(
other than very fast.
I love it!

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Sarah Williams

I had this problem too. Took a really long time on first load but now going back to it and refreshing is speedy.

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Joseph Cook

Posting this from the beta. More than willing to help out and test.

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Helen Anderson

Just published my first post via the app. Everything worked as expected and was just as easy as publishing via my desktop

A very enthusiastic two thumbs up 👍👍

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Gualtiero Frigerio

So far I’ve found nothing wrong with it.
All my apps use web views, they’re not a simple wrapper to a web app but I really like the hybrid approach.

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Stephanie Handsteiner

Installed. 👌

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Julia Torrejón

Brilliant!👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

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Prabhakar Mishra

Just curious,why did we chose to take native approach to built the app vs using something like Flutter or React Native?

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kenneross

Awesome! Will check it out 😊