Until now, no one has released any mobile App, while the xenforo community has been begging for a solution for years. If it's done in two hours then why was no one able to come through all these years? Or didn't anyone think of it?
I've considered making an app for Android for XenForo but there's several problems; A good app won't be as simple as the webview (which has already been explained), push notifications do require at least a basic understanding of Java which not all developers (even the fluent php ones) have, and distribution (as other people have said) is difficult. I'll elaborate on the distribution aspect of it.
For the distribution of an Android app (we'll ignore iOS which is even more complicated), you have to:
- Have an account to publish the app with, your options are:
- One account with every single site's app being promoted within it (which could lead to having numerous conflicting communities, over-crowding, your name associated with a site that you don't condone, etc).
- Make your clients get an account, which has a fee for each account (small fee, I think $20, I've had my account a while), requires a lot of tedious steps.
- Each app has a specific key, you have to save them in a very organized manner and every time you make a change you have to open each client's app, make the same change, recompile with their unique key, and push it out. This is very time consuming and more complex than just zipping one set of files (such as a normal add-on or style).
iOS has a more complicated process, a higher fee, requires a mac for development, and they are very strict in terms of shutting down accounts. They still have the same type of unique key for packaging the app as well.
Supporting the app for several clients would be more work than the original development, especially once it got popular. There is no way I would take part in a project like this without an automatic monthly rebill in place.
To do an app the right way, something I have absolutely considered. You need to know two different programming syntaxes (iOS and Android have a different basis). That's not really a dealbreaker as they are pretty similar but there are differences, it's not just copying and pasting to port it over. You need a mac, nobody is going to take an Android app without having an iOS version available. It doesn't need to be done with webview, it needs to be done with reading and parsing the json XenForo outputs (and making more data available than the core), rendering it in the platforms standard style. It gets a lot more time consuming. Making it acknowledge add-ons, like people still want their gallery and showcase items available. Making it take advantage of core, prominent features like directly uploading a picture from the phones camera. These are all much more complex. They're all doable, they just take time and more advanced skills. There are likely capable people in this community but XenForo is still a small market and this falls in line with other large add-ons, it's hard to justify making large add-ons when the money isn't guaranteed. Especially when you know the cost is going to be expensive and a lot of times the community doesn't like expensive.
