Possibility of running a website/webapp inside Android Phone

[JeevanisM]

Hey All,

This may sound dumb but just wanted to ask this question. I have this website running ( http://bhimonlineclassroom.in/demo1/ ) 

This is a simple website to show the educational videos in a categorical way. Now there is a situation, that the students who are geographically disabled on Internet access, to use this application. Since this is a website, they cannot browse it. I know the next option is to create an android mobile app which can access video files locally without internet. But I want to ask whether there is any kind of possibility we can use with web technologies, to access / display local files( in this case videos) stored in an android phone ? I have google a lot and read about the Progressive Web Apps and all, but I am not able to figure it out yet.

 

any ideas ?

thanks in advance.

[kongondo]

Here's some discussions/showcases on Progressive Web Apps. The first one is particularly helpful.

 

An alternative you could consider, if you have the time and want to pick up a new skill is to create your android app using Flutter ?

[Ivan Gretsky]

Good day!

One way could be to include all videos in the mobile app installation package, so all the content is downloaded when the app is installed. I am not sure it is possible, or if  there is a restriction on what you can put in the installation package and the size of the app, if distributed with the official stores. But that would be not a PWA thing, but rather a native app.

The other would be to allow to download (cache) just the videos you need from the list in the app. So you install the app and then download the ones you need, while still "have the Internet". This should be available in PWAs as well as in native apps. But anyway, there must be problems with caching Youtube videos you're using. I would expect problems caching those.

 

[psy]

@kongondo

3 hours ago, kongondo said:

An alternative you could consider, if you have the time and want to pick up a new skill is to create your android app using Flutter ?

Have been studying/playing with Flutter and catching up on latest trends in CSS, Photoshop, and other stuff during "all this sh*t" (that's what we in Australia call the pandemic that will never be named). Can't "asynch await" to put new knowledge into action ?

[flydev]

What @Ivan Gretsky said in his second paragraph. You will want to build your backend (ProcessWire) with a RestAPI, catching/storing media from Internet on the server and delivering content/data/media to your mobile apps (hybrid, native, whatever). The apps will fetch the data from there periodically and save theses data on the local Internal/External storage of the user device. I personally use heavily SQLite as storage with my mobile apps.

For the Youtube video, you can build something customized. You will not get stats about the viewers on Youtube but the end-user will have access to the media once synchronized.

The idea is the following. When you upload a video on Youtube, you then fetch the video from the backend and save it on the server. Then when the app will synchronize the data, it will get and store the media on the device which will be played offline inside your app with the media player of the framework used.

If the idea of catching, converting and storing the media directly from Youtube is against any Terms of Services, you could build and upload manually a compressed version of the media on the server. The goal is to have the media on the server whatever the method used...

And anyway, the user will have to manage to get an access Internet from time to time to be able to download/update the app from the store or to synch the data from the backend.

 

Also, shipping the media directly in the app (when downloaded from the app store) is a bad idea. You will ran into the issue where your binaries are limited in SIZE. Example, https://help.apple.com/app-store-connect/#/dev611e0a21f

About the app development, I think you should start with an hybrid one, it will be a good first experience and will be "quite easy" to build as the learning curve will be low and, you have already the competence required for it (HTML5, JAVASCRIPT, CSS). You will have to "just" learn how to put it in a native container.

[kongondo]

4 hours ago, psy said:

Have been studying/playing with Flutter

Cool! How you finding it?

[psy]

6 hours ago, kongondo said:

How you finding it?

It's fun and wildly different to what I'm used to. It's tight integration with VS Code makes learning much easier. Definitely worth a look

[JeevanisM]

On 5/24/2020 at 1:21 PM, kongondo said:

An alternative you could consider, if you have the time and want to pick up a new skill is to create your android app using Flutter ?

Yes, I got confused whether to choose Android SDK Dev or  Flutter ? which  one is a better investment ? 

[kongondo]

2 hours ago, JeevanisM said:

which  one is a better investment ? 

That's sort of a loaded question but given the writing on the wall, I would go with Flutter. There's articles out there comparing the two if you want to get into specifics.