boyofgreen

Hey everyone. I'm @boyofgreen from the ManifoldJS team. I'm excited to hear folks opinions both in favor of and with reservations for ManifoldJS. Our goal is to help web devs reach the app store users by creating hosted apps. In our opinion the best way to do that is to focus around the W3C standard so that devs only need to write one manifest. ManifoldJS will then handle the work of converting it (and polyfilling where necessary) for each platform. I don't think this is the right approach for every web app, but for many it will be. It's not 1999 anymore. Many of your web apps are of a caliber that meets or exceeds that of native apps. The more I seen native apps blending into the web (and bringing their walled garden, singular platform characteristics with it) the more I'm convinced we need manifoldJS. Hosted Apps maintain the cross platform code base, runtime generated, always up-to-date features that we know and love with the web. Now lets reach those users!

I wanted to jump in here and share our perspective. I'm the project owner for manifoldJS. In a nut shell, you shouldn't always convert your website into an app. Depending on who you are trying to reach, the web may be the only channel you need. My experience is that apps stores are reaching a different type of user, ones that web developers often want to reach as well. What we are trying to do is help web devs reach those users without loosing the essence of the web (real time generated, always up to date apps). Hosted apps are helping us close the gap. Again, this tool is not for every web app, and a poorly designed web app, will create a poorly designed store app every time.

Yes you can for the projects that use Cordova for polyfill. The other projects can be uploaded directly with the generated maifest