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.
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