Lack of an app is the primary reason my group will not use demiplane, we all rock up with Android phones and tablets and aren’t interested in a website.
This thread is interesting to read… It’s been over 3 years and nothing more has happened except that it was discussed by the team? Don’t get me wrong I have been a fan of Roll20 for awhile and although skeptical over the initial launch of Demiplane I have currently high hopes for the platform and it’s potential. Especially with the Roll20 integration and the recent support of many great game creators.
However, the only argument given against the app request is: “it works fine in the browser” but that isn’t even really true. It works and has some fancy visuals but it is actually quite slow with plenty of loading screens and not much caching it seems. Also on mobile it doesn’t quite fit and gives me a horizontal scroll bar. As a developer myself I looked a bit into the tech stack and it seems react is used which is a modern framework. There are ways to convert web apps to mobile apps but I of course don’t have the complete overview of the techstack to know if that would be worth the effort.
A fine alternative though would be a PWA which would allows you to save the website as a browser-based app. It seems to somewhat support this but only barely (38% on testing).
I could imagine a native android and iphone app would be quite the development investment but a proper web app should be a minimal investment and if you promote it correctly (ie. show install button on mobile browser) could completely replace the need for native app. Well in any case, just my two cents.
I’ve basically been playing D&D on DDB until this platform is “ready” in my eyes for a while now. The Demiplane/Roll20 acquisition has helped this platform catch up a lot, and even pull ahead in some ways. Roll20 is definitely a lot more feature complete than DDB’s Maps, after all. And the fact that it can be pulled into Discord for an all-in-one-window experience is pretty rad. At this point, I’m just waiting for my current campaign to finish and I’ll be full-time on Pathfinder with Demiplane/Roll20.
In fact, the main thing DDB has that Demiplane doesn’t is the mobile app. But if I’m being honest, the app sucks. Sure, it’s nice to have the digital books saved locally so I don’t need internet access, but I rarely don’t have internet access. My phone is always with me to hot-spot if I really want to read it on my tablet. The character sheets in app also don’t use any of the theme options, and the digital dice I’ve collected don’t show in app. I’ve realized more and more that it’s honestly kind of useless. I always end up using the web app.
So to me, the best thing the team could focus on (and what I’d wager they already are) is quality of life improvements. Things like only showing the options/selections you have access to, performance improvements (already made some nice jumps here), randomly getting signed out, et cetera. I’ve seen the same issue with the horizontal bar, and it seems to mostly be caused by the themes with fancy portrait frames. And even then, it’s only at certain widths. Responsive design can be tricky sometimes. There’s a lot of different screen sizes to account for these days. Also, I’ve never had the horizontal scrollbar issue when I use a “basic” theme. Might be worth a shot to see if it works better.
I personally think the app “works fine in a browser”, and would rather see the web app continue to improve than a mobile app. To me, it feels like one of those things you think you want, but in the end likely wouldn’t end up using often enough to justify. And I use my experience with the D&D Beyond app as my point of reference. Packaging up this site into a PWA by saving it to my device as an app works fine for me. I’d be curious to know what the ‘missing’ 62% of functionality is that you’re experiencing. That insight would probably be helpful for the Demiplane staff!
Hey Merubian, welcome to the Demiplane forums. I actually just resurfaced a request someone had made for a PWA for our nexus platforms. It still needs to be discussed and investigated by the dev team but I’ve added your post here to the request as well.
Hey thanks for the tip I haven’t looked into the themes yet! And yes I know from experience complex apps and responsive design can be a pain in the *ss 
Regarding the percentage I gave, that was based on a performance & PWA support test through Chrome’s Lighthouse (inside developer tools of the browser). I think it is available in Chrome but I am currently on the Vivaldi browser which doesn’t seem to have the PWA part of that test (anymore?) so I actual ran a test through webpagetest.org.
To get technical, it’s missing the manifest file which gives the right configuration for the app (default values seem to work OK at least) and some other missing files like icons plus some extra semantics in the HTML. Probably wise to (correctly) set up service workers to improve loading experience. For instance a lot of stuff could load asynchronously instead of completely blocking interaction with a loading screen.
Also, even offline-only support can be given with a PWA so I really believe a full native app can be skipped if they implement the right parts of a PWA.
To be honest DDB sucks if you think about how much resources Wizards/Hasbro has at their disposal. I think Demiplane has already gained some major ground in the latest releases and definitely see it blasting way past DDB if it continues on their path.
Oh wow you guys are really on top of your game, good to see the team is keeping a close eye on discussions! I would be more then willing to lend my professional view on things if you guys need more feedback or ideas.
“I know from experience”
A fellow developer? 
Haha yes indeed, long time dev here 