I think it really comes down to what your app needs to do to whether you’ll be able to get a good experience with a wrapped web app. If the things you are trying to accomplish don’t generally work nicely (though they may still work) and are a bit clunky in a browser then it’s going to be a similar experience with your wrapped bubble app.
It’s a hard question to answer on the surface because it’s often not a case of whether you can do something or not. You can achieve most things with a web app in a mobile browser, it’s just whether the experience is good enough.
The way I help clients decide on the right path to take is by listing out what is the core purpose of the app and the key things people are going to be doing say 80% of the time. You can then do an assessment on whether those things function well in a web browser or not - and for this you can often look to the mobile sites of similar apps. It’s not always a great reference as they may not have bothered to optimize their mobile site if they have native apps, but it’s a starting point.
Then you will be left with a laundry list of things of features that you need from your app that users will interact with a lot less frequently, and for those things you just need to be sure that there is a pathway to building them, and even if the experience isn’t gold plated it’s probably less of a concern if they’re not crucial parts of your app, and you can live with it.
For instance, someone posted on the forum recently wanting to use Bubble to build an app for miners that would be offline beneath the ground. For something like this I’d say - yeah you can do it, there is ways to make your app still function to a certain degree offline, but it’s clunky to build and probably use, so if your users are going to be using it in an offline state 80%+ of the time I’d say look for another solution.
Same goes for if you were building anything that required frequent use of the camera - such as an instagram clone, video conferencing, barcode/QR code scanner. You can build apps in a browser that tick all the boxes but the user experience is always going to be sub par vs. a native app.
On the other hand if you’re building an app that has recipes and workout guides and blog style content. There’s a pathway to building something like that with Bubble that the average user would probably never pick up that it was just a wrapped web app.
Sorry - a long winded response. But often the devil is in the detail so I thought it was worth exploring.
Josh @ Support Dept
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