iPhone Support

[TheEnvyus]

I am pretty ignorant on a lot of technical stuff, and was wondering if there was a way to use this this app on an iPhone?

[fmasa]

Hi @TheEnvyus,
I get this question a lot, so I will finally add some more context 🙂

Currently, there are several blockers to bringing the app to iOS and I don't plan to do it. However, I'm willing to team up with someone else who wants to take a stab at it.

Here are the biggest pain points (some of these are heavily technical):

Porting the code

While the code uses Jetbrains Compose Multiplatform (JCM) for UI, the iOS target is still in Beta, and many small problems need to be solved before it becomes a viable option.

Most of the code is already platform-agnostic, so once the iOS support in JCM improves, large parts of the app might be easily portable.

Some non-trivial parts of the app are platform-specific (these use Java libraries that would not work on iOS), and significant time would have to be invested in recreating them for iOS — mostly PDF imports that use the Apache PDFBox®.

Missing hardware

I don't own an iOS device. I have a mac device available, so I could technically develop the app in emulator, but I have no way to test the app on a real device, which would make the app development and bug reproduction nigh impossible.

App Store fees

Apple charges $99 per year for a developer account, Google Play charges $25 one-time fee.

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As one of my players has an iPhone, I know that this is a hassle. There are several things I'd like to support eventually:

Desktop versions (Windows, macOS, Linux)

This is already somewhat supported, but the CI pipeline has been broken for a few months and it's not fully polished (no Google sign-in, the UI is almost 1:1 mobile UI which is not great on desktop)

Web app

JCM supports Web as a target, though it's still in Alpha and not at all production-ready. Eventually, though this might be a good target as I can develop and test it. The hosting should be quite cheap. However since I cannot use Java libraries in a browser, some features would not work there either (PDF import).

Such web app can then be added as Progressive Web App on iOS (unless Apple decides to kill support for PWA as they hinted in the past).

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To reiterate, I don't plan to support iPhone directly, though some version might be technically usable on iPhone in the future (though no plans or timeframe for that). The time I have for WFRP Master is limited (it's a hobby project after all) and the cost/value does not make sense for me right now. You might consider using something like Hammergen.net which is web-first.

[TheEnvyus]

Thanks for the rely