The Franconian
Coder Studio

I recently encountered a frustrating issue with my surveillance camera app: after a certain time, it stopped receiving notifications. After reaching out to the developer multiple times without success, I stumbled upon a little-known Android quirk—the platform limits the number of notifications an app can display to 24. Once this limit is reached, no new notifications come through. As a temporary fix, I built a small app to automatically clear old notifications, ensuring I never miss an alert. In this article, I’ll share my journey of discovering this limitation and the DIY solution I created to work around it.

After realizing that PWAs couldn’t fully meet my mobile project’s needs, I turned to WebView as a solution. Unlike hybrid frameworks, which often come with unnecessary overhead, WebView allows me to integrate my web application directly into a native mobile project. This approach gives me the flexibility to decide how much logic runs in the web environment versus the native one, all while maintaining a lightweight architecture. In this article, I’ll share how WebView has become my go-to solution for bridging web and native development, offering the best of both worlds without the complexity of hybrid frameworks.

While Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are incredibly versatile, they still have limitations. Tasks like GPS tracking in the background or full file system access remain out of reach for web technologies. For my current project, this means most functionality can be handled by a PWA, but a native app is needed to fill the gaps. This ‘sidecar’ approach, while not ideal, offers a compromise until Web APIs evolve further. In this article, I’ll discuss the challenges of combining PWAs with native apps, the trade-offs involved, and whether this hybrid solution is worth pursuing.