MOBILE when?

[nothingismagick]

This is a tracking issue for our work toward making mobile available. The following is a citation from @tensor-programming
in the wg-tech discussion we had a few days ago:

Well much of it is just down to connecting the existing tauri library to the native webview.
And the native webview can be access a number of ways.
Though it would likely be easier to keep that access consistent across the two mobile 
platforms Thats why kotlin for instance was a choice that I was considering.  
Its got the ability to access both iOS and android.
So a lot of it is just taking our existing interface and molding the android and iOS 
webviews to it.
All those functions that set the title, push the javascript and html in, make a window etc.
And then I guess the final thing that you want to do is just make sure that you can 
compile the Rust with the other code and load it onto a mobile device
Though all of that should be straight forward.
We could take our c++ bindings and expand them for android and iOS or we could make 
a library using kotlin and/or java and swift
The rest of the stuff is just the same things that we are working on for tauri desktop

[Moxinilian]

Are there concrete points on which new contributors could spend time in order to move this effort forward?

[jbolda]

I don't know that there has been any concrete work done other than planning / research that is noted above. Are you interested in helping to push this forward @Moxinilian?

[Moxinilian]

To the extent of my capabilities, yes! But I am not familiar with the tauri codebase at all, perhaps I should read and understand it first.

[Moxinilian]

For what it's worth however, I don't really understand the motivation behind unifying both mobile implementations. The way one accesses them is sufficiently different that in my opinion they deserve specialized code. Also, adding a Kotlin layer would add one more layer of indirection iOS does not need as you can simply access the relatively simple WebKit interface through regular FFI (I am more familiar with iOS than Android however, so maybe the situation is different on the other side).

[tensor-programming]

@Moxinilian With Android you can access the WebView directly as well through the Android SDK. My reasoning for looking at Kotlin has to do with handling both platforms. Kotlin native can interface both with Android and iOS; it would basically let us share code across both platforms. The alternative would be to build two isolated layers; a Kotlin layer for android and a swift layer for iOS; it would get very complex though.

[stacygrace]

Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile seems like a good way to go here at some point. The UI layer for ios would still need to be done in swift but having worked on a couple multiplatform kotlin apps over the last year, it works really well. This particular link though is to a newer effort to improve the experience and may not be ready yet.

[nothingismagick]

coming soon ™️

[sumade123]

It's great that mobile is on the roadmap.

I am finding it a little difficult to choose what to use for a GUI right now for a new project. It must have easy support for calling Rust or Golang (or C library). This doesn't seem straightforward in RN/Expo, and desktop has to be Electron.
This really leaves me with Flutter, which is easy to use, but web support is not the best and I'd rather use HTML/CSS/JS.

Tauri on the other hand seems to be just what I am after, rust back end and web GUI.

If I must support mobile at some point though, say within a year, is Tauri a reasonable choice? Or is it too early to say, would really value your advice.

[nothingismagick]

We already have a working prototype for iOS, and within a year is totally reasonable for the major mobile platforms.