Hey folks I recently had an idea which requires checking my

Phone's gallery for new photos and sync them S3 storage.

A PWA (progressive web app) would be ideal because I would be able to support both iOS and Android with more or less 1 code base and I don't want to maintain 2 apps in two completely different tech stacks.

But PWAs don't get access to the photo gallery, so there's no way to sync automatically.

So I thought to myself: "why not just have a basic wrapper app that has access to the gallery via native API which passes the file to a webview running the PWA?"

But I have close to zero experience in mobile development so I can't judge whether this approach is feasible.

Any ideas why this might not work?

Imo it's feasible, but make sure: A) Security B) Make sure it doesn't nakes the phone slow af and most importantly C) you can implement it

I would essentially need to periodically run some code that could somehow query the gallery for photos it hasn't seen yet basically, check the gallery directory for files which are younger than lastUpdateTimestamp

So how exactly are you avoiding two apps with different tech stacks again?

by default, I would need to implement everything twice, once in Swift iOS SDK, and another one with Java/Kotlin Android SDK

Don't you already do that even with the PWA? Or is the image part just a tiny portion of the project

not exactly, I would only do the non-portable part in the OS-specific way. Everything else will be PWA, which ist shared across all platforms

Chec out ionic

Probably flutter is better

I remember having played with flutter a bit and I was surprised by how bad the performance was, it couldn't even render 30 fps on a mac

"on a mac" do you even care about it? if so, ohh idk about mac

if it can't run smoothly on a laptop, how will it run smoothly on a phone?

idk, i made a couple of apps which are workin' flawlessly on phones however it looks absolutely trash 🗑️ on laptop

Just do them native first imo

Kotlin multiplatform would be best choice

You can do Kotlin for iOS?

have you thought of using an existing app? immich or something? immich doesn’t yet support S3 but if you want you could try to implement it

Do not use the app as the only way to store your photos and videos. 🙃

something like :P there are a few others which are production ready

I tried the demo and it's full of bugs 😅🙈

immich?! i’ve been running it for months hahah haven’t found any major bugs yet

Google Photos can already auto "backup" all the photos online

No clouds :)

my 3 cents: please just write a better image viewing gallery for nextcloud

if you are using pwa, you can use capacitor to build for ios and android and then use codepush to generate and manage builds

https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism