Add a native android version of this app

[gmanskibiditoilet]

Describe the problem

We are so frustrated when we had cinny on the desktop, we want to use cinny for mobile too but it is not available on our android device.

Describe the solution you'd like

Please add a native android version of this app. You can also add a native ios version of it as well (but make sure to add android app version first!)

[GigiaJ]

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/9658361?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid

You can install Cinny as a Progressive Web App that will more or less behave as a native application.
You can do this on desktop too with Chromium and WebKit based browsers. Gecko-based has a few steps usually.

Probably wouldn't hurt to prompt the user when visiting the site on mobile and providing some sort of segway from the desktop instance to the mobile.

[gmanskibiditoilet]

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/9658361?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid

You can install Cinny as a Progressive Web App that will more or less behave as a native application. You can do this on desktop too with Chromium and WebKit based browsers. Gecko-based has a few steps usually.

Probably wouldn't hurt to prompt the user when visiting the site on mobile and providing some sort of segway from the desktop instance to the mobile.

nah, the web version performs much poorly compared to native android gg play application.
when we tried element web with jitsi call enabled, it performed poorly contrary to the element app on mobile android which was better.

[GigiaJ]

So... when you hit sign in on Element's website (https://element.io/) you're greeted with this:

Using the older calling implementation (jitsi) instead of the one Element is actively working on (https://github.com/element-hq/element-call) is likely not an ideal performance choice either.

Element themselves recommend you not use the web version on mobile. Much of the thought behind that is the mobile native versions have access to the Vibrations API for instance. In addition, that they didn't plan for the UI to scale to mobile.

The performance shouldn't be relevantly different. Some exceptions for situations like using Firefox for Android which has a slew of problems of its own.

To clarify further for Cinny to make a native version it would have to be entirely rewritten OR just a wrapper of the PWA that you can install with the steps above.

Either way Element's poor performance has no bearing on Cinny's mobile behavior (which I am actively prioritizing).

[gmanskibiditoilet]

for this reason, if you have any PRs on porting this application to android, please mention it here, we would love to hear what is going on!

[GigiaJ]

Doubt anyone will port to native as it'd be an entirely different code base. Wouldn't even be Cinny at that point. It's basically the same as asking to write a second Cinny from scratch without being able to reference any of the code from Cinny. The upkeep on that alone would be unreasonable. It's why a unified web app is the way to go. Allows a smaller number of maintainers to prop up the project (especially since they're unpaid).

Wrapping the web app with something like Capacitor and having it behave as a native app isn't too bad for Android. For iOS you need an Apple Developer account to put it on the app store or TestFlight.
This would at most grant you more screen real-estate at the moment though. It'll functionally behave as it already does when you make it a PWA.

Just isn't high on my personal to do list to set-up Capacitor, make sure the UI looks right still, deploy it across Apple's app store and the Google Play store (and I'd absolutely be overstepping my bounds doing that).

That said my open PRs here make up about 400 commits ahead with changes like calling, true push notifs, cross-device sync e2ee message drafts, and mobile UX improvements (slide to reply and long slide to edit w/ a bottom up context menu).
So a good bit to improve how mobile "feels" at least.

[Henry-Hiles]

Can't Tauri compile to android?

[GigiaJ]

That would be a wrapped web app at the end of the day. Seeing as they were complaining about the web app performance I doubt they'd want that.

[Atemu]

Seeing as they were complaining about the web app performance I doubt they'd want that.

FWIW performs acceptably for me. I haven't used it as extensively to judge for sure but it kinda does feel faster than EXA to me.
This is in Firefox on a Fairphone 4 btw., so not a high-end phone at all. uBlock too.

The most major issue for me is missing web push support

It's also not being kept "alive" as long as a native app would but that might be a user agent problem.

[Atemu]

That said my open PRs here make up about 400 commits ahead with changes like calling, true push notifs, cross-device sync e2ee message drafts, and mobile UX improvements (slide to reply and long slide to edit w/ a bottom up context menu).

Where can we find this work of yours and what's the status on that?

[Atemu]

Another thing I have found is that tauri v2 claims to support android. Once cinny-desktop is ported to v2, it might be quite easy to make it usable on mobile given how well cinny performs in a mobile browser.

Perhaps this issue should be split in two? One in the cinny-desktop repo for an android port and one for making the mobile experience usable?

[iGerman00]

Please don't also forget iOS, there are hardly any good clients for it. Those that are present, apart from Element, care very little about the UI and UX conventions on iOS and are generally difficult to use and enjoy.

[sertonix]

I got cinny on android to the login screen but no further yet. (Note: I build it using the alpine linux build system for a reproducible environment, probably needs to be adapted for other systems) https://codeberg.org/sertonix/rports/src/commit/7b7717cccd6d7d79c05bf5a871ad61391f97875b/random/cinny-android/

[sertonix]

Login worked with a different matrix account!

[RubberDuckyDJ]

Please don't also forget iOS, there are hardly any good clients for it. Those that are present, apart from Element, care very little about the UI and UX conventions on iOS and are generally difficult to use and enjoy.

I'm pretty sure tauri v2 also supports ios

[xelab04]

Hi! For what it's worth, I did get the Cinny desktop app compiled for Android, and running on my Nokia 6.1.

npm run tauri android build
$BUILD_TOOLS/zipalign -v 4 \
    release/app-universal-release-unsigned.apk \
    /tmp/cinny-aligned.apk
$BUILD_TOOLS/apksigner sign --ks ~/.android/debug.keystore --ks-pass pass:android --key-pass pass:android --out /tmp/cinny-signed.apk /tmp/cinny-aligned.apk
adb install /tmp/cinny-signed.apk

I did yank out a few bits of code to get it to compile (not that much), and the finished app is pretty "meh" but it is still quite cool. The following is a screenshot from my phone: