Web apps have a bright future, with only Safari lagging behind. (Did you know Steve Jobs originally envisioned AL mobile apps to be web based?)

I have emailed Jonathan Davis (web-evangelist@appl..) from Safari several times over the last few years asking when Push Notifications will finally be supported. Without this, websites need to rely on email as a retention mechanism.

But here’s the thing with all this. It’s a lot to build and support all these operating systems, where things constantly change. Even more to have an integrated unified solution.

Take for instance onboarding. New people click an invite link and go to your site. First you want an instant social experience. That’s easy enough: just have each invite have a unique link confirming that phone number or email, and when they arrive show them all the friends who uploaded hashes from their Contact list where they are found. And show all the content they have already engaged with. But wait, phone numbers only have 10^7 possibilities roughly, so that’s a trivially reversible space. SO now go read about the state of the art from Signal and others and figure out your own more secure solution.

And after this you want the user to download the native app so you can send notifications to them, they can upload their Contact list and find their friends, invite people easily etc. Seems easy: just redirect them to the store.

But wait. You want attribution for campaigns, and you want to resume sessions. How to do it? Well you could use SFSafariViewController to get the web cookies but that’s been deprecated in iOS so now you need to to use SFAuthenticationSession.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a project that would take care of all this shifting stuff for you so you can focus on building the core of your app?

Well that’s why I started Qbix initially. We keep adding free open source plugins to solve these individual problems:

https://github.com/Qbix?tab=repositories

Go ahead and grab them, we plan to maintain them as the OSes change since we use them in our ow apps.

But this is literally the tip of the iceberg. Most of the questions have to do with social and communty features like roles, permissions, realtime sync, offline notifications, user authentication across apps, payments, and so on.

If you want something that will let you develop new web based apps at record speed or support turning existing websites/apps into social apps with accounts (think turning git into github) without reinventing the wheel you are welcome to the code

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

It is licensed under AGPL so if you want to keep your code private and not open source it to your website visitors then you’d have to contact us for a license, which at this point is probably like $100 a year regardless of users. But for FOSS projects and weekend stuff it’s totally free, to promote the improvements of the ecosystem.

Here is the vision long term: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

Oh also we aren’t happy with the state of mobile browsers when it comes to supporting content addressable routing, verification of resources, encrypted web push notifications secure access to contacts by websites, and so on. So we are building the Qbix Social Browser:

https://projects.invisionapp.com/m/share/TKHYMVSJNW2