Build mobile app from this web app (how?)

[ezwelty]

We have a mobile app for Android and iOS which has been downloaded a combined 45 000 times. These apps have tens of thousands of users, but they are buggy, use a legacy Rails API, and are no longer maintained. This repo introduces a new mobile-friendly website which hopefully can be leveraged to replace the aging mobile apps. The question is how?

Web

The legacy mobile app is a web app bundled as a mobile app using Apache Cordova. This tool is no longer maintained, but we could use its new descendent: Ionic Capacitor. My experience with Cordova suggests that this would be the easiest (if not the most performant) option, reusing nearly all the same code and requiring only a thin layer of platform-specific configuration.

My sense is that this is the only feasible option we have for quickly delivering mobile app users an updated experience.

Native

Since this web app is written in React, it is tempting to suggest React Native, but these are very different beasts. They could share logic if as much as possible was moved out of the view components (Redux store, custom hooks, basic functions, etc), but a migration is far from trivial. Something that could help is React Native for Web or the superset dev platform Expo. But evidently it would have been easier to build a React Native app that also works for web than the other way around.

The third option is to start from scratch. But this would require a mobile dev team with long-term commitment to the project, otherwise we end up in the same situation that we've tried to escape: too much code and too little time.