Downloadable Mobile APP for Salesforce

Question

Can we create downloadable app with HTML 5?

I have seen the WEB APP example (hosted on Heroku) with HTML5. How can I create a mobile app with HTML 5 can be download/install on phone?

Answer 1

You can't create a downloadable app with HTML5 - they only run in the device browser.

If you are targeting iOS, you can use what is known as a 'home page app'.

In this situation you open your HTML5 app in the browser then click the following icon at the bottom of the page:

This will open a dialog containing the following icons:

If you then click the 'Add to Home Screen' icon, this will add a tile to the home screen of the phone (Blog Home in my example):

and now your users can tap the tile to go straight to your page. Note that if there is a login required, user will have to login each time, as essentially its just creating a shortcut to the page in the browser.

If you need an installable application, you can create a hybrid remote-start application using the Salesforce mobile sdk. This provides a thin application that you install on the phone which retrieves and displays pages from Salesforce. The upside to this route is that everyone is always using the latest version of the application content (i.e. the pages from Salesforce), but the downside is that the application requires connectivity to work.

If you are looking for an application that will work without internet connectivity, you'll need to look at a hybrid-local, which is more costly to develop as you are building the application to run entirely inside the device, making testing more tricky.

Also, if you are targetting iOS, you'll need to sign up for a distribution license from Apple - either for the app store or an enterprise license to distribute internally within your company. There's a bit of jumping through hoops involved with the licenses, so be prepared to spend some time on that.

Answer 2

You can develop your application using HTML5 and use Salesforce SDK for packaging and creating .apk for Android and .ipa file for IOS .You will need MAC machine and apple developer certificate to generate .ipa for IOS .

The SDK of salesforce comes with Cordova library that provides capability to generate the thin wrapper for packaging and generating a necessary files for porting to device .

Answer 3

If the question is "Can we create downloadable app with HTML 5 alone", then the answer is NO. However, as has been pointed above, you can use the Force.com Mobile SDK which uses HTML5 + Cordova which provides the overall packaging to create apps which can be downloaded/ installed on devices.

HTML5 needs a container to run in - that's usually your browser (in case of pure HTML5 apps) or a framework such as Cordova.