I'm with you @felipe. I had to spend some time to understand how to even "install" the PWA on my iphone (open stacker.news in safari, click the "share" button, choose "add to home screen"). But now that that's done, i'm fine just having that.

And all due respect to @TonyGiorgio and other nay-sayers in this thread (which seems to be... everyone) it is not only possible for a single dev to make such an app, it's both been done and been proven to be extremely loved by users.

I'm talking about the reddit iOS native app Apollo which was developed by a single guy named Christian Selig, which used reddit API to make a nicer iOS experience. Was it popular? There was a 2 month long "protest" and sitewide rebellion when reddit changed API usage fees suddenly, which made Apollo and other 3rd party apps economically unfeasible to maintain.

Christian has made the source code available (as much as he can) here (and his other repos): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend

@felipe I don't think you should spend time on this right now, for two reasons;

First of all: Apple is reeally fucky about "zaps". They don't allow any payment for digital content in an app that doesn't go through their own system (which takes 30%). They shut down Damus (nostr client) for a while, caused an uproar few months back. Now, on Damus, you can't zap individual posts (thats "paying for digital content") but you can zap creators of the post. Weirdly, some iOS apps DO allow zapping individual posts (eg the app Zion). If you're not used to dealing with Apple Developer rules... it's not a pretty process. But that's what keeps iOS native apps high quality.

Secondly, Christian Selig worked at Apple before he made the app that became so popular (i think Apollo accounted for like 20% of reddit traffic at some point). He was extremely good at design, his app was a hundred times better than the official reddit native app. Reddit had an excellent API as well. Does stacker.news?

So everyone in the thread saying its not possible or shouldn't ever be done, they are wrong. Empirically. But there are probably better things to spend time on, imo.

Note that I am an Apple-exclusive user (and sometime-developer), so I don't know the situation for zaps on android. When I was doing mobile apps, it was usually never worth developing for Android over Apple because android users don't spend money on apps.