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.
For now tag can be selected in Preferences -> Tags
Read articles from your mobile
Review User and Organization profile
You can go to authors' profiles and view information about them, links to resources, and a list of articles.
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.
I believe in power of community and that we can build an interesting app 😊
GitHub
Downloads
For now its just a link to apk file.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TJTZZ8G1YGmBEzwsEPS2sklrcvBb7lu6/view?usp=sharing
Top comments (18)
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.
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
If there are two competing standards, let's build a third one.
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 😢
The APK for the official (seemingly discontinued) dev.to app can be found here
Exactly, this is the reason I want to build a new app.
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 senseI 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
And for some users dedicated mobile app is much more comfortable then site
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
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.
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.
How could I try this on my iPhone?
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.
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 :-)
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...
#apple_add_support_for_apk_like_files
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!
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 😉