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2020-02-28 12-17-20
Hugo Gonçalves
Staff
1690Views
26Comments
Announcing the discontinuation of the OutSystems Now App
Discussion
Mobile
Announcement

Hello,


This month – July 2020 – we'll release Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) for everyone. In case you haven't heard about them yet, they're new mobile-optimized versions of web apps that you can install through your browser. They increase customer adoption and retention by engaging customers with frictionless experiences.


With PWAs, you'll also be able to test the look and feel of your native apps without having to generate a native build. With this new and improved testing capability enabled by PWAs, we will discontinue our existing OutSystems Now feature.


From Platform Server 11.9 onwards, the OutSystems Now experience will no longer be available in the development environment experience. OutSystems Now will still be available in Google Play and TestFlight until November 2020. After that date, we'll also remove it from Android and Apple stores.


OutSystems Now stopped being supported earlier this year, and we advise our customers to move to PWA mobile testing as soon as possible.


Update: OutSystems Now will stop being available from AppStore on January 4th 2021.

Update: OutSystems Now will stop being available from Google Play on July 27th 2021 (latest APK file version attached).


Thanks,

The OutSystems team

OutSystemsNow.apk
12
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21 Jul 2020

Hello Hugo.


How can we test/see mobile apps in IOS and Android after November 2020 ?

Thanks

0
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21 Jul 2020

Eurico Matias wrote:

Hello Hugo.


How can we test/see mobile apps in IOS and Android after November 2020 ?

Thanks

"With PWAs, you'll also be able to test the look and feel of your native apps without having to generate a native build. With this new and improved testing capability enabled by PWAs,"

 

1
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21 Jul 2020

Eurico Matias wrote:

Hello Hugo.


How can we test/see mobile apps in IOS and Android after November 2020 ?

Thanks

 Hi Eurico,

You can use PWAs to test and view your mobile apps after that date.

Thanks,
Hugo Gonçalves

 

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21 Jul 2020

Thanks guys, I think it will be important to share in this post some link to a page with information on how to use PWA in tests.

Cheers

0
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21 Jul 2020

Miguel Verdasca wrote:

Thanks guys, I think it will be important to share in this post some link to a page with information on how to use PWA in tests.

Cheers

 

Hi Miguel,

To use PWAs instead of OutSystems now to test your apps, you just need to have PWAs active in your environment. Doing that, the PWAs experience replace all the places we had linking to OutSystems Now experience.


Please check this link for more details

https://success.outsystems.com/Documentation/11/Delivering_Mobile_Apps/Early_Access_-_Distribute_as_a_progressive_web_app_(PWA)


Thanks

Hugo Gonçalves

1
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21 Jul 2020

Hugo Gonçalves wrote:

Miguel Verdasca wrote:

Thanks guys, I think it will be important to share in this post some link to a page with information on how to use PWA in tests.

Cheers

 

Hi Miguel,

To use PWAs instead of OutSystems now to test your apps, you just need to have PWAs active in your environment. Doing that, the PWAs experience replace all the places we had linking to OutSystems Now experience.


Please check this link for more details

https://success.outsystems.com/Documentation/11/Delivering_Mobile_Apps/Early_Access_-_Distribute_as_a_progressive_web_app_(PWA)


Thanks

Hugo Gonçalves

Hi Hugo,

Can one enable the PWA, while having self-signed certificate on the environment?

Regards,

Swatantra

 

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24 Aug 2020

Good that we have 2-3 months of overlap for people to transition from OS Now to PWAs. 

0
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21 Jul 2020

Good approach Hugo, it will be very useful! Thanks

0
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22 Jul 2020

Thanks Hugo for you clear explanation !

Regards

0
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22 Jul 2020

Hi Swatantra,

You'll need to run chrome with the following flag: --ignore-certificate-errors It will give a warning but it should work. 

If you don't use that flag, you won't be able to register the service worker, and, therefore, the app won't be recognized as a PWA.

Let me know if this answered your question.

Regards,

Ricardo Alves

0
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31 Aug 2020

PWA's do not support things like the barcode scanner, this is really bad. Outsytems now should only be deprecated when PWA functionality has had a chance to mature.

0
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18 Sep 2020

Joel Gold wrote:

PWA's do not support things like the barcode scanner, this is really bad. Outsytems now should only be deprecated when PWA functionality has had a chance to mature.

 Agree. 

 

0
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23 Sep 2020

Replying to Abdul quadir Saifee's comment on 23 Sep 2020 04:55:26

I totally agree.  I would've just made a PWA if it weren't for needing to scan.  

0
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30 Oct 2020
2019-11-14 11-05-00
Grazina

Hi Joel, Abdul,


OS Now was always meant to be the way developers test native applications fast. Nowadays, the platform makes it even easier to develop custom native applications and test them fast.

Let me back-trace our steps from the early days of building mobile applications with OutSystems.

OS Now was the first solution we offered our developers and customers to build mobile applications. At the time, we even offered the native source code of OS Now so customers could brand the native experience and go to production with their our unique applications. 

Evolving the product, we made sure native applications could be generated easier, with less friction, and this meant a great deal of native customization was made available in low-code and generating the native application was made simple. We also introduced the ability to include different plugins other than the ones made available by the default OS Now. These two capabilities reduced the overall differentiation value of OS Now, as developers could now test their own specific customized native application, with only the native plugins they require. We still kept OS Now available so there would be a very quick way for developers to test the native applications that don't have specific needs for native plugins. Applications requiring access to specific native capabilities have always had the need to be generated - but again, this was made so simple.

With the introduction of PWAs, the testing of these types of applications became even easier than actually having a supporting native application for this purpose, and this rendered OS Now obsolete.


Kind Regards,

João Grazina


1
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24 Sep 2020

Grazina wrote:

Hi Joel, Abdul,


OS Now was always meant to be the way developers test native applications fast. Nowadays, the platform makes it even easier to develop custom native applications and test them fast.

Let me back-trace our steps from the early days of building mobile applications with OutSystems.

OS Now was the first solution we offered our developers and customers to build mobile applications. At the time, we even offered the native source code of OS Now so customers could brand the native experience and go to production with their our unique applications.

Evolving the product, we made sure native applications could be generated easier, with less friction, and this meant a great deal of native customization was made available in low-code and generating the native application was made simple. We also introduced the ability to include different plugins other than the ones made available by the default OS Now. These two capabilities reduced the overall differentiation value of OS Now, as developers could now test their own specific customized native application, with only the native plugins they require. We still kept OS Now available so there would be a very quick way for developers to test the native applications that don't have specific needs for native plugins. Applications requiring access to specific native capabilities have always had the need to be generated - but again, this was made so simple.

With the introduction of PWAs, the testing of these types of applications became even easier than actually having a supporting native application for this purpose, and this rendered OS Now obsolete.


Kind Regards,

João Grazina


 PWA  have very few  extensions, and most users will find that extensions they were used to in OSNow is not available for a PWA app, yet.  There is also the issue with PWAs in iOS that are brought back from the background freezing the screen elements, and there is no details for a simple true “fix” for that that I’ve seen on any of the forum questions on the topic, it’s basically creating dozens of handlers that create a undesirable user experience when the app is brought back from the background.


so with OSNow gone, developers of any apps that need extensions are left with little to work with, for the time being. Developing a native app seems like the only possible rout for apps that need a barcode scanner. That means many weeks and weeks just to get to “test” your app with even Google taking Up to 14 days to review an internal test track deployment.

I understand the hope for PWA, and I agree that if the features were in par it’s Preferred over maintaining OSNow, it’s just not there yet I guess  

 

0
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30 Sep 2020

Hello! I still use v10 so no PWAs.. we are planning migration to v11 in couple months but OutSystemsNow will end first.

I would like to know it will be removed from TestFlight and Stores early or end of November.


0
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05 Oct 2020

Hugo Gonçalves wrote:

Hello,


This month – July 2020 – we'll release Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) for everyone. In case you haven't heard about them yet, they're new mobile-optimized versions of web apps that you can install through your browser. They increase customer adoption and retention by engaging customers with frictionless experiences.


With PWAs, you'll also be able to test the look and feel of your native apps without having to generate a native build. With this new and improved testing capability enabled by PWAs, we will discontinue our existing OutSystems Now feature.


From Platform Server 11.9 onwards, the OutSystems Now experience will no longer be available in the development environment experience. OutSystems Now will still be available in Google Play and TestFlight until November 2020. After that date, we'll also remove it from Android and Apple stores.


OutSystems Now stopped being supported earlier this year, and we advise our customers to move to PWA mobile testing as soon as possible.


Thanks,

The OutSystems team

 

 Thanks for sharing this information. 

0
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06 Oct 2020

I would like to know it will be removed from TestFlight and Stores beginning or end of November.

0
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06 Oct 2020

Carolina Bessa wrote:

I would like to know it will be removed from TestFlight and Stores beginning or end of November.

 

Hi Carolina,

We still don't have a precise date when the OS Now will be removed from TestFlight and Google Play. When we know I will post here.

Thanks

0
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07 Oct 2020

Hi,

To help this transition we decided to give a little bit more time and keep the OutSystems Now on App Store until January 4th 2021. After that date, the OutSystems Now will no longer be available on Google Play and App Store.

Thanks,
Hugo Gonçalves


2
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26 Oct 2020

We have used OutsyemsNow in our regular web applications to enable barcode scanning. We do not want to write 2 applications. One for Web and  then another one for Mobile. Our web apps are mobile friendly enough except they they cannot access the phone hardware hence we used OutsystemsNow. 

Howe are you expecting us to proceed now that you remove OutsystemsNow.

Is the PWA feature available for regular web apps? We are on OS 11.

Thank you.

0
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30 Oct 2020

Hi Fabian,

Just to clarify, when you say regular web apps, you're talking about Traditional Web, right? If so, we're not planning on having PWA for Traditional Web Apps.

However, and on the bright side, web browsers can already leverage many of the mobile devices' capabilities. Web APIs already have access to camera, sensors, microphone, etc... You can look at a full list here.

This means that, programmatically, you can take advantage of many of these capabilities and use it in web applications. While we don't yet support an official web bar code scanning component, our Forge already offers some components, this QR Code Scanner, for instance, that you might explore. This might lead you in the right direction.

Let me know if this answered your question.

Regards,

Ricardo Alves

1
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02 Nov 2020

Replying to Ricardo Vaz Alves' comment on 02 Nov 2020 11:45:29

Hi Ricardo

Thank you for your reply. I will take a look at that QR code scanner and see if it works in our Traditional Web App. 

Fabian

0
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02 Nov 2020

Thanks for info

0
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30 Oct 2020
2022-10-17 06-51-09
Shweta Gedam
Champion

Thanks for sharing this information. It's really great.

0
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03 Nov 2020

Is this APK still working as it is not connecting my OutSystems Environment.

Can someone help ?

0
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13 Mar 2022
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