DWEP App — Tech framework research - storage and notifications
I've been looking into possible tech platforms for the last week or two. A few people recommended using Ionic, so i've tried it out a bit and also looked into Vue which is one of the front-end frameworks that can be used with Ionic. I've also looked at PWAs
PWA
I've looked at storage and it's not clear what solution is reliable there. It seems to me that the storage could be done with PWA and using localStorage or indexedDb. The persistance on iOS is more secure when having installed a PWA than for a website/webapp
Another thing to consider is notificaitons. I haven't looked much into this yet, but from what i can see it's not possible to send background notifications on iOS if there's no app running. On Android it may be possible with periodic background sync on PWAs. We probably need to have an actual app for this to work on iOS. On desktop it's probably not going to work for any platform, but desktop is not the priority. We may want to consider if the user can put notifications outside of the app, to remind them. If we can accept this approach then we can use a PWA and don't have to build on MacOS (required for building apps for iOS)
Ionic
Ionic has it's own storage options, some of which are unreliable and some are difficult to set up. See a discussion here for example
I haven't tried notifications with Ionic, a native app would have to be built for that to work, but the capacitor documentation says it's possible and i guess we can trust that
Other options
A third tech platform/framework alternative that could be interesting is using Flutter. Or i could try Compose Multiplatform (i have studied Compose before and used it a bit)
Summary
- PWA has decent support for storage but no notitifications
- Ionic has notifications, and various storage solutions (not sure what is best)
- Flutter and Compose Multiplatform can be worth looking into
