Upcoming: Android app 🚧

[tamimology]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
No android mobile app available, I can only find for iOS :(

Describe the solution you'd like
Try to have an app that runs on Android, to have at least the viewing/browsing feature of the photo albums on the self-hosted server.

Describe alternatives you've considered
N/A

Additional context
N/A

[alexanderadam]

Maybe it would just be easier to implement an API for existing apps.
For instance parts of the Nextcloud API or simply something like DAV.

[viktorstrate]

Since this is by far what I've been asked about the most, I've started building a native Android app for Photoview.
Because I only have limited prior experience writing Android apps, the project is just as much a learning experience, and thus it will probably take a while before the app is usable and available in the Google Play store.

If anyone has experience writing Android apps in Kotlin, I'd love a helping and and I will probably also be looking for maintainers for the Android repo in the future.

I will keep this issue open until the app is ready to use. Feel free to use this thread for discussing the general aim. For specific things like bug reports, please open new issues over at the new repository.

https://github.com/photoview/photoview-android

[PrzemekSkw]

Hello, any news about android app?
Regards

[viktorstrate]

@PrzemekSkw It's not forgotten but expect it to take some time before it is usable, and expect progress to be made in bigger chunks at times when I find time. You can watch the project on Github to get notified about updates.

[jckkk]

If anyone has experience writing Android apps in Kotlin, I'd love a helping and and I will probably also be looking for maintainers for the Android repo in the future.

Would it not make more sense to use Flutter? Not that I have experience, but it is more modern and gives the possibility to eventually build both apps (Android and iOS) from the same source code.

[winnipeg21]

I would just like a simple android app that is a glorifed web browser just for starters

[jckkk]

I would just like a simple android app that is a glorifed web browser just for starters

This you can have already by installing/creating a shortcut using Chrome or Firefox and it works relatively well.

The app would be great to cast images to Chromecast which is currently impossible. The overall experience should also be a bit better.

[PrzemekSkw]

It will be great to have app like Immich. I use it with my Android now.

[winnipeg21]

I would just like a simple android app that is a glorifed web browser just for starters

This you can have already by installing/creating a shortcut using Chrome or Firefox and it works relatively well.

The app would be great to cast images to Chromecast which is currently impossible. The overall experience should also be a bit better.

I guess doing a shortcut could be useful but would need to be mobile friendly. Something like google gallery layout would be perfect. Hate photo apps that looks straight out of 2010 lol

[eixel05]

Looking forward to this. I hope it's still in the works

[kkovaletp]

I like the idea of reusing what we already have and build a cross-platform mobile app, which can be easily updated from the main repo code, maintained, and published in both app stores (instead of having completely independent on the code level project with developed manually app, which then needs to be supported and maintained like another project). So, I did some fast research using ChatGPT, and here are some ways, it proposed:

MobiLoud: MobiLoud allows you to convert your PWA into a native mobile app. It’s a service that takes your PWA and wraps it into a native container that can be published on the Google Play and Apple App Stores.
Trusted Web Activities (TWA): TWA is a technology that allows you to use PWA standard online services in a special container based on the Chrome browser. From the user’s perspective, it acts just like any standard application and these can be published on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
Appdome Secure PWA: Appdome allows you to convert any website into a mobile app. You simply enter the website address for the website you wish to convert, choose an App Name, then choose the App platform: iOS, Android or both.
Flutter with WebViews: You can convert a PWA into a Flutter Mobile App for Android and iOS using the flutter_inappwebview plugin.

From this list the Flutter option looks the most promising, however, a mobile developer might want to review other options and provide some additional ones.