Hi All,
Is Cordova still a viable option for porting WWWC Apps to Android and/or IOS, or is there a better option as we are 10 years removed from the below referenced whitepaper?
[https://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2015/Jan/06/Using-Cordova-and-Visual-Studio-to-build-iOS-Mobile-Apps]
TIA,
Steve
Cordova is still around and kicking and it's a decent solution but it's been renamed. You'll want to look at Capacitor which is the tooling that's used around this. It's a pretty complex toolchain, and there's all sorts of pain around the Apple App Store (or Android) but building the apps and being able to side load them on the phone is relatively straight forward as long as you can follow very long sets of instructions...
Been there done that - don't like it, but it works.
+++ Rick ---
Thanks Rick.
Have you worked with or heard anything about .NET MAUI, Good, Bad, Ugly?
TIA,
Steve
Not good - I've used it, it's terrible and it looks like Microsoft is losing interest once again. A bunch of people on that team were laid off in the recent Microsoft purges. The technology is decent, but Microsoft is stifling forward momentum and there the lack of decent UI tools and the entire toolchain is terrible.
For .NET I'd look into Uno or Avalonia, which are 3rd party solutions that are well used and have been around for a long time that are much more approachable and are actively supported and much more similar to older solutions (specifically WPF). Uno in particular looks interesting as they have some wicked cool designers and Figma integration that could really help speed up mobile development. And both platforms have much better support for cross platform desktop apps (Windows, Mac, Linux) in addition iOS Android and also WASM (in the browser).
I've used Avalonia for a small x-platform Desktop app and it worked great. I have not used Uno but out of the two I think they are more open (ie. not trying to monetize every little corner) and also have more features in the base control set.
If you have a Web app that is well designed and mobile friendly, Capacitor is a good way to go - the hard parts really are the app store pieces and that will be a pain in the ass no matter which solution you chose. When I helped a customer publish to the App Store, 90% of the problems we had with these apps was related to getting the app deployed and dealing with Apples guidelines and limitations (took like 10 resubmissions to get it approved - most of it bureaucratic bullshit related to subscriptions).
+++ Rick ---
