I am a new user but I have been using Udemy for a while now(4 months). I have watched almost every video on the 2d unity tutorial. On my phone. So I thought maybe an app on Playstore or Appstore should have gamedev.tv as an app but I could not find one. I was dumbfounded. Well, just thinking an app for a growing community like this would not be a bad idea.
Tell me your opinions below:
Gamedev.tv uses progressive web app technology. If you browse the community site from your phone, it will offer to save the site to your phone. This functions like an app. It puts an icon on your home screen, gives you phone notifications, etc.
To add to what Anthony said, most web apps these days are designed to be what we refer to as ‘responsive’. This is done using the variety of layout tools available including things like Flutter, React-Native, Flexbox, Bootstrap, and such. These tools often use CSS or SASS to style the UX in a manner that scales well for different screen sizes and desktop.
Some developers believe a desktop app design should be a separate concern from a mobile app design, but it’s not a hard rule. Most people want both and ‘responsive’ web and app development are important considerations.
That said, I’ve never looked at the GameDev site on my phone, but it’s based on a COTS framework made by Teachable, and Teachable scales to mobile just like Udemy, so I would bet the GameDev site does, too. I would be surprised if it didn’t.
Well…once again, to echo @Anthony_Juarez
I think what Anthony meant, but did not actually say is: A standalone app would be redundant, expensive, unnecessary, and actually a little dangerous. The website scales nicely to all mainstream mobile formats and it is easy to create a button to open your browser directly to the site server, which is where all of the content is managed. It’s SaaS (software as a service) and it’s done by professionals and specialists.
On a mobile device, this connection would leave the phone using TCP/IP protocol over LTE, WiFi, or Bluetooth. It is already in the ‘language of the web’.
TCP/IP provides the addressing scheme for computers that communicate via internet through IPv4 addresses (like 192.1868.0.50) or IPv6 addresses (like 2603:b23c:d:a421:edcd:9c82:41a4:7a5b). The digital data gets transmitted and received via your choice of whatever is available on your device (LTE/WiFi/BT).
To build a standalone app would take a front-end engineer and a back-end engineer, or a very highly paid full-stack engineer with several years of experience. The end product would be a standalone app that would interface with the main website server and would actually have to pull various API endpoints from data strings retrieved from the main site server.
This could actually slow your process down somewhat for the sake of using interfaces.
When accessing the standalone app via mobile, it would leave as a web request over TCP/IP through LTE, WiFi, or Bluetooth (no different than before) but it would have to do the extra work of interfacing with custom APIs through the same server to get the same information.
It takes more work to do the same thing.
The app would also require a maintainer.
Now the fun part: Hackers.
Building a standalone app offers a host of other venues for hackers to access valuable info. If the app is built by beginners, the attack surface is going to look like Swiss cheese. If the app is built by a security conscious professional, then it isn’t going to be cheap.
Simply put: It’s not worth the cost to reinvent the wheel.