Build and publish your app

It is time for the happy moment to share your app with others. For testing, for sharing with friends, or for publishing on the app stores.

To make an Evothings app available to others, you have the following options:

Building and publishing a native app takes some effort. If you wish to share an app in the quickest possible way, it is recommended that you go for the first option. Start out easy and deploy your app on a web server, then run it from Evothings Viewer.

When you are ready for app store publication, learn how to build native apps with Cordova.

Apache Cordova is a build system for creating native apps with bundled HTML and JavaScript content. Apps built with Cordova are native apps that can be published on the app stores. Furthermore, you can add plugins to extend your app with native functionality.

The following are the steps to make a native app:

  • Install Cordova

  • Create a Cordova project and build a native app

  • Publish the app

Installing Cordova

First step is to install Cordova. Here are installation guides for different platforms:

The Cordova install procedure and command line tools are also described in the Cordova documentation.

Building a native app

When you have Cordova installed, you can build a native app. Read the Evothings Cordova Guide to find out how to create and build a Cordova app and how to use Cordova with Evothings Studio. You can also consult the Cordova documentation.

Publishing your app

Final step is to publish the app on the app stores:

Supported platforms

Supported mobile platforms for Evothings are iOS and Android.

Cordova comes with a set of plugins that are supported for a wide range of platforms. Evothings apps can use custom plugins available for iOS and Android. As long as you do not require socket communication or BLE, you should be able to use Evothings Studio to build apps for any platform supported by Cordova.

The same goes for Evothings Viewer. It is available on iOS and Android, but should be possible to build from source for any platform supported by Cordova. (But you would miss the plugins not available for the target platform.)

Evothings Viewer is itself built with Cordova. It is a plain Cordova app with native plugins added, e.g. for socket communication and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).