I put an early DEV iOS app up on GitHub and would love your help!

ben

Ben Halpern

Posted on June 22, 2018

I put an early DEV iOS app up on GitHub and would love your help!

I spent a bit of time building a the beginnings of an iOS app:

GitHub logo forem / DEV-ios

DEV Community iOS App

Build Status GitHub License Language Maintainability Test Coverage

DEV iOS 💖

This is the repo for the dev.to iOS app.

Status:

Released first version, more info: https://twitter.com/bendhalpern/status/1061323718058786822

Design ethos

We will grow to include more native code over time, but for now we are taking the approach of native shell/web views. This approach lost favor early in iOS days, but I believe it is a very valid approach these days. It is inspired by how Basecamp does things. Our tech stack is a bit different, but the ideas are the same.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-3-for-ios-hybrid-architecture-afc071589c25

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3743-hybrid-sweet-spot-native-navigation-web-content

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3766-hybrid-how-we-took-basecamp-multi-platform-with-a-tiny-team

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA

By leveraging wkwebviews as much as possible, I think we can make this all pretty awesome and sync up with our web dev work pretty smoothly. And where it makes sense, we can re-implement certain things fully native, or build entirely native features. Life's a journey, not a destination.

Contributing

  1. Fork and clone the project.
  2. Build and run the project in XCode.

This is a call for anyone who wants to improve it in any way. I'm not super experienced in this arena, and neither are the other folks on the DEV team. I do think we're taking a good approach to start off (described briefly in the Readme), but you're welcome to debate me on the million ways to build native apps. 😄

By the way, we're actually getting close to open-sourcing our whole codebase. It will happen some time in July. We'll announce a target date at some point next week. We can't wait to give the code back to the community.

Thanks for being wonderful. I look forward to learning from any iOS devs who care to make an issue or PR on this project to improve it in any way.

Happy coding ❤️

💖 💪 🙅 🚩
ben
Ben Halpern

Posted on June 22, 2018

Join Our Newsletter. No Spam, Only the good stuff.

Sign up to receive the latest update from our blog.

Related