My Thoughts About Using Android Again as an iPhone User
I used to be a hardcore Android user. It was my second major kind of smartphone (the first was Windows Mobile 6.1 on a T-Mobile Dash) and it left me hooked to the concept of smartphones and connected tech in general. I've used many Android phones over the years but one day I rage-switched over to an iPhone. My Samsung Galaxy S7 pissed me off for the last time and I went to the Apple store and bought an iPhone 7 on the spot. I popped my sim card into it (after a lovely meal at Panda Express) and I was off to the races. I haven't really used Android since other than in little stints with devices like the Amazon Fire 7 (because it was so darn cheap).
Recently I realized that it would be very easy to package up my website for the Google Play Store using pwabuilder. I've been shipping my site as a progressive web app (PWA) for years (and use that PWA for testing how the site looks on my phone), but aside from the occasional confused screenshot that's been tweeted at me I've never actually made much use of this. It does do an additional level of caching (which is why you can load a bunch of pages on the site, disconnect from the internet and then still browse those pages that you loaded like you were online) though, which helps a lot with the bandwidth cost of this site.
So, I decided to ship this site as an Android app. You can download it from the Google Play Store here and get a partially native experience. It worked perfectly in the Android emulator but you really need to experience it on a phone to know for sure. On a whim I grabbed a Moto g8 Power from Amazon and then I used it for the final testing on the app before I shipped it on the Google Play store. I unboxed the phone, set it up, plugged it into my MacBook and then hit "run" in Android Studio. The app installed instantly and I saw the homepage for my site.
