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Cover image for DECO — Unofficial DEV Community App
Andrey
Andrey

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DECO — Unofficial DEV Community App

Hello, my name is Andrey, I’m practicing Flutter developer. For a while I have been working on the useful project, in my opinion, and thrilled to share with you.

Motivation

I began to think what more complicated I can do. I got to know the Dev community a while ago and found it very interesting and promising. What a surprise it was that it didn't have a native friendly mobile app, not even a community version. Somehow that's how I came up with the idea of creating an open source Dev app. I'm looking forward to any suggestions, whether it's development help, design, or new features.

Quick overview

Let's talk about the features you can see in the app for now. In the process of development there were a lot of ideas that I really hope to implement. Some, of course, are limited by the capabilities of the API. I'll make a roadmap a bit later.

Select preferred tags

By default you can read popular articles and the newest ones at once (the output may be a little weird, you may give out articles in different order, not update articles for a long time, but that's all because of the API's peculiarities). Right on the home page you can add the tags you are interested in and read the current articles.

Tags selection page Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone 14 - 2022-11-16 at 13 16 40

For now tag can be selected in Preferences -> Tags

Read articles from your mobile

Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone 14 - 2022-11-16 at 13 01 00 Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone 14 - 2022-11-16 at 13 01 18

Review User and Organization profile

You can go to authors' profiles and view information about them, links to resources, and a list of articles.

Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone 14 - 2022-11-16 at 13 05 05 Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone 14 - 2022-11-16 at 13 04 44

Theming

App lives in light mode and dark mode, of course. Just one of the future features is the ability not only to change the accent color, but also to completely change the appearance of the application, adjusting to a comfortable and favorite format for you.

Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone 14 - 2022-11-16 at 13 08 05 Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone 14 - 2022-11-16 at 13 07 23
Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone 14 - 2022-11-16 at 13 07 31 Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone 14 - 2022-11-16 at 13 07 44

I believe in power of community and that we can build an interesting app 😊

GitHub

https://github.com/ytskk/deco

Downloads

For now its just a link to apk file.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TJTZZ8G1YGmBEzwsEPS2sklrcvBb7lu6/view?usp=sharing

Top comments (18)

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cicirello profile image
Vincent A. Cicirello

I'm confused by this. Your post indicates there isn't a DEV community app. However, there actually is. In fact, there are 2 official apps. I've been using the DEV Community app on Android for a little over 2 years now. There is also the Forem app. Forem is the platform that DEV is built on. With the Forem app I believe that you can use DEV as well as other communities built on Forem. I haven't actually used the Forem app.

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ytskk profile image
Andrey • Edited

Yes, it seams like PWA, maybe it’s some translation error) I meant that there are no apps, that community provides and etc.
My thing is to build more user friendly app

UPD: Not PWA, sorry, but simple native wrap on web view

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dominikbraun profile image
DB

If there are two competing standards, let's build a third one.

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jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

Also, the dev.to site itself used to be installable as a PWA... but for some bizarre reason they've chosen to remove that capability 😢

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jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

The APK for the official (seemingly discontinued) dev.to app can be found here

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ytskk profile image
Andrey

Exactly, this is the reason I want to build a new app.

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jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

Seems like overkill, when all dev.to need to do is turn back on the manifest.json file to make the site installable again. I don't even like using the old APK. Why would I want to install a real app just to use a website standalone? It makes no sense

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ytskk profile image
Andrey

I just wanted to make it more friendly. In mobile version of site it’s hard to inspect tags articles or switch to another tag, if you want to see what new in #opensource, for example, you need

  1. open burger menu
  2. Tap tags
  3. Select followed tags or use search
  4. Then open a tag

And for some users dedicated mobile app is much more comfortable then site

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jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

The dedicated dev.to APK IS the website - it just shows it in a web view. Making an app like this is just a waste of space. Don't think I'm saying yours is though - nice work on doing it in Flutter

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ytskk profile image
Andrey

Well, thank you, in any case, I really like this project and I will continue to develop it, and if joined by others, it would be great. I just want to provide an alternative.

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cicirello profile image
Vincent A. Cicirello • Edited

Looks like the DEV app is listed in Google Play Store as a beta that is full. I'm guessing their intention might be to replace it with the Forem app, which works with DEV and the other Forem communities.

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andypiper profile image
Andy Piper

How could I try this on my iPhone?

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ytskk profile image
Andrey

Unfortunately, to install it on the iPhone I need a developer account, which I don't have at the moment. But there is also a second option, to build the application from source. This is not very difficult to do, if you are interested, I can help.

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andypiper profile image
Andy Piper

I cloned the repo but it obviously needs some additional setup to build in Xcode, would be great to understand what I need to do to get it compiled :-)

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ytskk profile image
Andrey

Thank you for your interest. I apologize at once, it is not very nice just to send links, but with this format is difficult to fully tell and control what and how to do.
First, you need to download the Flutter SDK
docs.flutter.dev/get-started/insta...

Then you can you need to run flutter pub get to get all packages.

And then I believe this links will help
medium.com/front-end-weekly/how-to...

stackoverflow.com/questions/544445...

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fyapy profile image
aabdullin • Edited

#apple_add_support_for_apk_like_files

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trnwrckd profile image
Ishmamur Rahman

This is great. I didn't know I needed this app untill I installed it. At first I thought 'why is there no login feature', but the fact that I can open any post from my browser in just one click, is great UX. Thanks Andrey! ❤️ A really nice job!

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ytskk profile image
Andrey

Thanks a lot! And this is just a beginning. Authorization and quick link open will be in future versions, I’ll post roadmap some later.
Stay tuned 😉