Ionic + Liveview / Ionic + Vue / PWA mobile app

Hi,

I’ve created a small web app and now I would like to turn in into a mobile app (iOS and Android). All I need is a wrapper really so I think Ionic would be a good choice. On the front end, I would like to use Liveview, it should be perfect for what I need. Another solution is Vue, but as I don’t have much experience with it, I would use it only if it has some really big advantage over Liveview. Third option is a PWA, I also don’t have any experience with it, and I haven’t seen many PWA apps so I’m not sure if that would be a good choice.

Could you please give me some advice and guidance on how to proceed?

1 Like

The simplest way to have a PWA web app is to add a manifest file to it, and you can use an online generator:

https://app-manifest.firebaseapp.com/

This manifest file will allow your web app to be added into a mobile device and “behave” and “look” like a mobile app.

After this you can then start to try to add to your web app more features of a PWA, like support for service workers if it makes sense.

A good starting point may be here:

1 Like

This may or may not help you with your specific choices but I just posted a blog on hosting PWAs with Phoenix. I use our Websockets client as an example. This particular one is pretty simple and only uses a dash of AlpineJS but no reason you couldn’t go all out with Vue or similar.

For what it’s worth, if you plan to integrate with Phoenix routing and hosting (not just APIs), Vue is likely to be simpler than Ionic. Ionic requires you to use their build tools and I have found fiddling there to be quite tricky. With Vue, you could get started by simply dropping in a script tag and binding components to elements on the page. You could then do what I do in the blog and just point the router and assets the right way.

2 Likes