🎉 New Thunkable ✕ PRO Feature: Publish your Project as a Web App 2020-03-11

Announcements
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So, you’ve taken the time to learn how to use Thunkable (or you’ve remixed one of our awesome starter templates!), you’ve carefully crafted your user interface and thoroughly tested your blocks. Now you want to share your app with the world!!!

Well…you want to share your app with your friends and family at the very least.

We’ve always given you publishing options with Thunkable ✕. You can download your .apk and publish it to any Android store. You can also submit your project directly to the App Store for iOS devices. Today we’re delighted to announce that PRO users now have the option to Publish your project as a Web App.

What is it?

Publish as Web App allows you to - at the click of a button - generate a sharable web link for your project. You can send it or share it to anyone you like, and the recipient can see your project directly on their phone, or on their computer.

(h/t to @jane @joannietw @aniolpages @maxb & @Nice_kode4 for their help translating the subtitles of this video)

Try it for yourself

Here’s a link to our popular “Rollin” sample app.

This link will work great in any browser but is best experienced on your phone:

Custom Domains

You can also set up domain forwarding to make nicer looking domain names for your app, in the case of the Rollin app above, I’ve also set up: rollin.domhnallohanlon.com

Publish to the Web

To get started, click “Publish” and choose the “Publish as a Web App” option at the bottom of the menu

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The first time you publish a new project you will have to click on the blue “Get link and publish” button:

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The next screen gives you a lot of control over your web app. You can open the app in a new tab, copy the app link, share your app through popular channels, and you can even “unpublish” your app.

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Updating your app

Each time you publish it’s similar to releasing your app in one of stores. This means you can make changes and updates to your existing project without worrying about users seeing a half-finished new feature that you’re still working on.

When you’re ready to release a new version, choose “Publish as a Web App” then click the blue “Publish current version” to update your app. The URL will remain the same, but the project that it links to will be updated.

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Unsupported Components

A number of components are not supported at the time of launch. In some cases we will be able to add alternative components while in others we may be able to add support in a future update. There are some rare cases where we won’t be supporting certain components in web apps. You can find the full, up-to-date list in the Thunkable Docs

Share Your Apps

We can’t wait to see what you build with this new feature - please use #MadeWithThunkable when you’re sharing on Twitter and we’ll retweet our favourite projects.

If you want to share your apps in the community you can post them as a reply to this post, but the best place is in the #ShareYourApps or #SuccessfullyTHUNKd section

Upgrading to PRO

This is just the latest perk that we’re offering for our PRO members - you can see a full list over on our pricing page.

If you’d like to try web app publishing for yourself you can upgrade today directly through your membership page.

Finally, any questions about PRO membership can be asked in the comments here, or you can reach out to us directly by emailing us: hello@thunkable.com

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This is amazing! Thanks Dom - However I am getting the error message “Something went wrong - please try again” when I press the “get link and publish” button

Also I can’t seem to copy my project either… similar errors,

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Thanks @jacob1 - can you try doing a hard refresh and try again please?

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I’ve hard refreshed, and noticed it generates a link for some of my apps. Could it be that it is erroring on projects that have been replicated from other projects?

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Can you PM me your project and we can test that theory out?

Thanks

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All good Dom, this works thanks so much!

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Thanks @jacob1 - glad to hear it.

Looking forward to seeing what Web Apps you publish. Feel free to post in #SuccessfullyTHUNKd!

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Wow! I don’t believe I can even create web applications now!
I have just a few notes:
1: The web application should be displayed so that it fills the entire screen and does not look like a phone display.
2: It should be possible to change the URL.
3: The thunkable logo should be disabled when loading the site.
4: The active platform block is out of date. image
5: Admob ads don’t work in the web application and still see the banner ads as a picture, can you add a component of Facebook ads? (In my opinion, Facebook ads can also be displayed on websites)
6. And it would be great if the application could be embedded within another website (with HTML)

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Glad to hear you like it!

This is deliberate - for the moment at least - try opening the web app link on your phone :iphone:

You can do a redirect, if you like, is this what you mean?

I’ll bring this to the team, thanks for highlighting!

Wow…yeah…thanks! I’ll mention this too.

We have a list of unsupported components (which includes AdMob, and since it’s for native mobile ads only we won’t be able to support AdMob in the future either.) Hopefully web-based ads will be available in the future. :crossed_fingers:

I haven’t tried this yet - but would an iFrame work for something like this?

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This is really cool! Can’t wait to implement this.

I think this would be good, maybe landscape view in desktop? Mobile version is perfect view.

Also:

Hopefully this is just temporary.

I am currently having an issue with this, that text input doesn’t work. No rush on me to use this feature, though I definitely will be using it. Can’t wait to see full released version with everything working. Definitely will be implementing into websites.

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Can you share a sample so we can test it out?

I was thinking about this some more @point - turns out you can just use this:

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Here’s the link @domhnallohanlon
https://thunk.app/w/6x08ks9z

Fyi to anyone curious, I’ve tried to embed this with no luck. Would be great to set custom domains in the future.

Text input is fine on desktop but not working using Chrome, Android 9 on Samsung Galaxy S8.

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This is awesome!!!

I see local storage isn’t supported at this time. Any timeframe for this? How would this work even? I feel like a solution with cloud variables is in the works. Using the method I posted about recently would be a viable fix I think. I’ll work on this over the next week and see if I can get something working.

What about the app type variables. Will these work @domhnallohanlon?

Am I correct in thinking the “stored” type variables won’t work?

Previously I was wary as the time between phone and firebase can be slow depending on signal strength and this isn’t ideal when rapidly accessing a cloud variable from a phone. But with the internet connection already present, this should be lighting fast!!!

I will use this model. I will be exchanging the text blocks with “IISCA” for the userID provided from the realtimeDB when logging into the app

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This is amazing!

Just saw the YouTube tutorial, and got to know this :sweat_smile: I’ve been busy working with my app these days.
This is indeed a great feature, thanks Thunkable!

Thanks! :blush:

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Hello! This is awesome.

It seems there may be some issues using the Realtime DB for authentication. Please see my example. This alerts me to an incorrect API key, however, immediately after publishing to the web, i downloaded the APK and login worked just fine. Perhaps I missed this as a ‘not working’ component.

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Thanks for the response! I only have one more thing to say, remember there will be people (maybe me) who will use thunkable just for developing web applications, so it would be good to have components that are knowledgeable for web applications (even if those components are not running on Android or iOS)

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Thanks @point - do you have specific components in mind for this?

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Congratulations !! Being able to publish as a web application is incredible.
just what I needed.
For now I have not published any project. When I press the get link button, I get an error message. Refreshed browser, but continued error

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Hey @fjfon - which error message are you seeing?

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I didn’t understand how to change the URL of my web application …

1 Like