Install any website as an app for a quick access 🖥️

Surfable.app is a website to be able to install any website as an application. It is built with Express.js and uses google-play-scraper package to search in Google Play Store and to get the metadata.

• Surfable.app creates a Progressive Web App for each website that redirects to an URL
• It uses Google Play Store as a source of data by using apps' names, icons and developer website
• The search also works using Google Play Store data
• Because it uses the developer website as the URL of the app, some URLs can be wrong, but it can be corrected (see the documentation below)
• Some links may be missing on the search (you can make a pull request to add them)

If you don't know Javascript, just open an issue explaining what link you would like to add / edit. Otherwise just follow the steps below.

If you realize that a website redirects to the wrong URL you can correct it by following these steps:

1. Search for the app name on Surfable.app
2. Copy the appId from the URL for example in https://surfable.app/pwa/com.sandoche.gitnews/ it would be com.sandoche.gitnews
3. Edit the following file src/data/websites.js
4. Check if the appId does not already exist, if it does, edit the object and if it does not exsit, add a new object like below to the array:

{
  title: 'Twitter',
  appId: 'com.twitter.android',
  developerWebsite: 'https://twitter.com/',
  icon: 'https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/wIf3HtczQDjHzHuu7vezhqNs0zXAG85F7VmP7nhsTxO3OHegrVXlqIh_DWBYi86FTIGk',
},

5. Note that omitting one of the fields will take the default value from Google Play. You can for example omit the icon field, and the logo will be retrieved from Google Play.
6. Then just do a pull request

If a website could not be found in Google Play, it needs to be added manually.

1. Edit the following file src/data/websites.js
2. Check if the URL you would like to add does not exist, if it does edit the object, if it does not exist, add a new object like below to the array:

{
  title: 'Kanbanote',
  developerWebsite: 'https://www.kanbanote.com/board',
  icon: 'https://www.kanbanote.com/assets/app/images/icon_512x512.png',
  appId: 'www.kanbanote.com'
},

3. Note that the appId can be anything except the ones that are already used on Google Play, so putting the website address is a safe choice, also the icon should have a size of 512x512
4. Then just do a pull request

git clone [email protected]:sandoche/Surfable-app.git

npm install

npm run start

npm run dev

Since this project scraps data from Google Play, the number of queries are limited per server, therefore in case of problem we recommend you to host your own instance of Surfable.

docker build . -t surfable
docker run -p 3000:80 surfable

👤 Sandoche ADITTANE & Farbod SARAF

• Twitter: @farbodsaraf
• Github: @sandoche

Contributions, issues and feature requests are welcome!

Give a ⭐️ if this project helped you!

If you like this project, feel free to donate: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/surfable

Copyright © 2022 Sandoche ADITTANE & Farbod SARAF
This project is Apache 2.0 licensed.