We are excited to announce the MorphMarket App. This app is a Progressive Web App (PWA) which adds enhanced navigational features to the website for a better mobile experience for mobile phone users.
Watch this video for a tour:
To install the app look for the “Install App” button at the top of the home page. This will either install the app directly or provide simple instructions. If you do not see this button read this.
You will recognize the app by the Dark Header and Footer menu bars as pictured here. The app adds the following:
Quick access from a Home Screen icon
Full screen to maximize viewing area
Persistent buttons at the top of the screen for quick access to Categories, Search, Messages
Contextually sensitive buttons at the bottom which change depending on the page
Better menus that allow quicker navigation around the site
This is a “beta” version, meaning we’re still improving it and working out possible bugs. In the future, we will be adding notifications on your phone for new messages, better offline experience, and access to the video camera for photo capture. It will also improve along with the main website as we redesign more pages.
It’s an app-sort-of™ — kinda like thing. It’s a mobile web view, I think that’s a more accurate way to say it. MorphMarket can brand it how they like, but from a technical POV it’s something like a progressive web app with a dedicated mobile web view, which I wouldn’t call an app in the native mobile device sense of the word.
All terminology is terrible…human languages are semantically ill-equipped for some kinds of communication, forget I mentioned it.
I’d love to see a native iOS app someday.
I might even be a good project manager or dev lead for that eventuality, just saying.
Mad love to all, always.
You are correct in that it is a Progressive Web App, which has its benefits for our uses.
Where as a native app needs separate development for Android, IOS… etc, a single PWA works on whatever device or OS you have, be it a mobile, tablet, PC… this keeps things nice and easy to maintain while also keeping costs down without the need for multiple developer teams… which is ultimately worked into the cost to customers over time.
Out of interest, what features do you think are missing that we could have on a native app?
I am a huge advocate of web apps, actually, PWAs too, and I appreciate why MM chose this path at this time, completely.
I don’t know that it is a matter of feature completeness, but rather of familiarity, for the users of a given platform.
There’s one glaring gap in the current functionality, at least for the use cases of my partner and I:
The share button goes directly to Facebook and without signing in to Facebook that’s the end of it. I can’t find any way to copy the url of an ad in the marketplace to share it with people , usually my partner-in-all-things. If it exists, I cannot find it. We share links back and forth via the web browser constantly, through Messenger/SMS, while hunting for our next big get. The app is therefore not very useful to us yet, though I’m sure some folks are getting exactly what they need from it. URL sharing seems pretty fundamental, to me, but I am not a good measure of the general public. However, my girlfriend is not a tech nerd, she’s a normal wild-type web user, and she can’t find it either, and stopped using the app independently but for the same reason.
always.