When will we get an Android Tipitaka app from SuttaCentral ?
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Hello Arpan, and welcome to the forum!
We already have one, it’s called PWA 
Just open suttacentral.net in Chrome, select Add to home screen and voila, you have a fully functional SuttaCentral android app (also comes with offline functionality, if you wish to enable it in site settings).
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PWA is not as useful as an app, especially in developing country. If the app is published, many of people will be benefited.
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Could you please share why do you feel that PWA is not as useful as a “proper” app?
Is it because you feel it lacks in functionality or is it solely because it is not published in the app store?
Did you try and use the PWA yourself? Was there anything in particular that you found you couldn’t do?
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Bandami Bhante, when will we get an android app of Tipitaka from Suttacentral?
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Never.
Use the site as a PWA, it works fine on any reasonably modern Android device.
If someone wants to make an app, the data is all there, help yourself! But making an app would double (or more) our development load, and it simply isn’t worth it. Modern PWAs are, for our purposes, every bit as good as an app, and we will focus on making the site better. We can even get the site added to the app store, we just haven’t got around to it yet.
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Greetings Arpan, and welcome to the forum.
I’m a moderator here, and just noticed that you had a question and answer to this same topic elsewhere, so for clarity and convenience I’ve merged them all into this thread 
If you need any assistance just tag the moderators ‘@ moderators’ but without the space
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For me the off line version saved into the pwa seems a little fragile, that it can get removed. Then you have to download it again. I’ll have to try again.
Is it possible that the pwa concept wasn’t really made to store that much data off line?
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It’s not the PWA concept, it’s the different devices. It depends on the amount of free space as well as the browser/OS.
Over time, we hope to offer more control over what exactly is downloaded. In addition, obviously devices get more space on them over time, and support for PWA improves.
There are also new possibilities opening up in the web sphere, such as web bundles.
The SC core team will remain focussed on making the website as good as possible. But it would be great to see someone using our data to make different apps (like sc-voice does.) If the functionality is simplified then it would be easier to make an app.
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Hi @Arpan,
I started a TWA in March this year at GitHub - michaelh-sc/suttacentral-android-twa-app: SC App Trusted Web Activity - it works with offline suttas as well as the current Web App does, I would say, and was mostly for possible placement into the Google play store.
This method may not allow app updates to sync down Sutta updates in the usual app update cycle, or on an initial install, but it may be possible!
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Nice, when I get back to Sydney maybe we can discuss this some more.
I’ve been using it on my Android phone for a while and found no problems at all. Great job!
This sent me back to my school days and the James Bond classic “Never say Never again!”… and you know how inspirational those school years can be in retrospect. 
So, since Bhante kindly gave permission
For all those people out there, who just like me are technologically challenged…
Here is (((( drum roll, please)))
The Sutta Central Android app!
If downloading and installing, you will need to enable 3rd party APK installation in the Settings>Security tab of your Android phone.
Thanks to @Sujato @michaelh and @Arpan for the inspiration.
Now, before y’all get too impressed… this is just an automatically generated APK of the original PWA site.
I was basically researching what this PWA, TWA thingie was all about when I came across this site which promised to do it all automatically (Wonders never cease on the Internet!! ).
Within a few minutes, it generated the APK I’ve linked above. I tested it on my phone, and it worked!
Unfortunately, I can’t remove the address bar from the app, as that requires the developer to verify permission. May I send across the instructions I received for verification to the technical team of Sutta Central? Also, if Bhante @Sujato will permit, the final APK can be uploaded to the Google Playstore, thus fulfilling a long standing request of the SuttaCentral community.
Yay, Team SuttaCentral! You guys are the greatest! 
Update: OK, so I found this Github with a lot of stuff I didn’t understand… the gist being I think, that there is an on/off going effort to create an Android app from scratch.
And then there is this…
So, as a non tech layman may I point out just why we basic users keep asking for an Android App:
- We feel uncomfortable with technology… and suspicious about the ‘Add to home’ feature. (Yes, its irrational!)
- We feel comfortable using an app downloaded from the Playstore as it seems ‘legit’ even if its just the same PWA site in disguise!
- It’s so much more convenient to tell friends “Just search for SuttaCentral on the Playstore”, rather than trying to give out the web address (was it .net, .org or .com??
)
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Okay, well this looks fun.
Send the request for permission through and we’ll have a look at it.
I presume that there’s some details to be filled in on Google Play? It’d be important to mention that this is an unofficial app, even if approved, and hasn’t been tested or developed by the SC team.
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There’s a file to be downloaded and publically hosted on a server, and then the APK can be submitted to the Play Store using a Developer account. (new account costs $ 25).
I’ve PMed you the details, Bhante.
Great, very good find! I will check it out this week and have a look through the source code it generates, I bet there are things that it does differently/better to the one I worked on
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