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I live in Lausanne, Switzerland, and few years ago the public transport released a mobile app called tl.

At the very early release the mobile app was quite a crap and sometimes a could see that it was simply a web browser pointing to a responsive website. I could tell that because on same pages the developers forgot to remove the URL bar so I could see to what URL the mobile app was pointing; later on, visiting that page I realized that, yes, it was not a mobile app but just a web page. (it also had Angular logo as favicon).

This intrigued me because it meant that the mobile app that I downloaded form the Android store was just a package containing a web browser that was dropping a link on my mobile. This makes things ridiculously easy to develop and cross OS indeed!

More than 1 year has passed now. I've inspected the mobile app today through logcat but the only URL I could find is this https://tl-apps.t-l.ch/ ; probably the app is pointing to some port, clearly not 80, or 8080.

But my curiosity remains and I would like to know if there is any framework out there capable of making a mobile app out of a responsive website.

To give you an example this is the tl mobile app on my Android: enter image description here

And this is the same page that you can see on your desktop browser if you visit the page https://www.t-l.ch/webapp/ enter image description here

As you can see it's possible to make a mobile app out of a responsive website, you just need to:

  1. Put a browser into the mobile app package
  2. remove the URL bar from the browser
  3. Allow such browser to visit only the *.t-l.ch website
  4. Drop an icon on the Android/iOS mobile that will trig the browser to open when clicked

...and that's it, you made a cross mobile app out of a responsive website.

Do you know any framework that works like this?

Thank you

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    stackoverflow.com/questions/4794893/… not a framework, but not very difficult at all once you have a mobile web site
    – Esther
    May 2 at 15:39
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    That app was never just a web site, the app bases on Apache Cordova which allows to create apps using HTML and JavaScript, but additional to a web browser it provides interfaces that allows to call platform functions from within JavaScript code, so you can do things that are normally impossible in a web browser.
    – Robert
    May 2 at 16:13
  • Thank you @Esther, that is exactly what I was looking for. ou can post it as the answer and I will up vote it. Thank you
    – Francesco Mantovani
    May 2 at 19:20
  • Thank you @Robert for the details. Why the AngularJS icon? Is that used in Apache Cordova? I'm not a mobile expert
    – Francesco Mantovani
    May 2 at 19:57

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That's the way I like it!

@Esther gave me the reply in the comment, I just need to use WebView to show web content in an app.

enter image description here

I now need to investigate if if there is the same for iOS.

But as @Robert said there is a downside to this approach: if there is no internet connection there is no app :(

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