The site already works pretty well on mobile. What will the app do differently?
Some practical benefits are
  • Much friendlier/intuitive installation process (compared to web app)
  • The app can register itself into "Share" dialog, so e.g. you see some good article in any app, click on share, SN is an option to immediately create a post out of it
  • Easier to do the views and animations (it's possible with web app, but somewhat tricky to make it performant)
  • Good notifications when you earn sats, or a person you are following posted something (again can be done with web app, but it's not that easy)
  • The post detail view can have two tabs - one to see comments and one to see the actual iframe. That would make it really easy to go back and forth between the article and comments.
  • Thumb friendly UI - e.g. the common actions are on the bottom so those can be reached by thumb. Also "tap" targets would be bigger...
  • Standardized/intuitive experience, e.g. hamburger menu in the usual place as in other mobile apps, etc. When you you swipe the left sidebar shows up.
  • Potentially can act as a mobile wallet (this is more of a brainstorm, but it would be cool to earn some sats on Stacker News and buy a beer with that immediately...)
  • Idea: Could have a "Read later" feature to essentially create a backlog of articles that I would like to read when I have time...
I also like the web app and it should always be an option to use web app, but there are some practical benefits to mobile app.
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The other option is to also improve the current web app to add the features that I mentioned above (e.g. you could set manifest.json, set ServiceWorker, give it mobile icons, use the JS API to register notifications, do the element swiping, etc...)
Isn't there a way to then wrap that web app by some WebView and put it on app stores?
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yes! to all of this @nout
great vision!
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