Mobile app for theFB

djspecialist

I know this has been asked before, but just to reiterate - wouldn't it be nice to have a mobile app for theFB?

I don't mean "access the mobile version of the site using the browser on your phone" - I mean an *app*.

Why would this be better than using the mobile site?

• Ability to present a more native / mobile-tuned UI for browsing and reading posts
• Simplify the process of adding photos to posts - imagine being able to just click "add photo", and then select one from your DropBox / Google Photos / WhateverElse app ... and it just works, without you having to dick about copying URLs
• Get notifications as native popups on your phone, instead of them going to your GMail spam folder

AFAICS Vanilla doesn't offer any mobile apps, but it does expose a RESTful API which might allow one to be created.  Admittedly the API is somewhat simple and I don't think would support notifications, but it should support the first two examples above.

From a quick poke, this API doesn't seem to be enabled in theFB's deployment of Vanilla.  Modmins - has this been looked into?  I'd be willing to take a look at this, if it's something which people think would be useful.  Feel free to PM me.

TTony

djspecialist said:

wouldn't it be nice to have a mobile app for theFB?

Yes it would, very much so.

djspecialist said:

Modmins - has this been looked into?

Pretty much all of this workload falls on Nick (MQ), who's a busy man with very limited time available for dev R&D - which is one reason why we've not been able to do much R&D to date!

djspecialist said:

Feel free to PM me.

Doing it now.

monquixote

The version of vanilla we are using doesn't support the API plugin though I'd very much like to move to a version which does and I've got a build that does on a dev server. 

Like most things on Vanilla it doesn't actually work so I'm going to need to poke about with it and find out why and fix it.

Once that's done I'd very much like to build a mobile app with React Native, but i expect it would be quite a bit of work.

Any help gratefully recieved.