Convert web application to iPhone application

Question

I have an existing web application (PHP/MySQL) that I want to "wrap" into a native iOS application and publish. Is there something that does this easily? I've spent a good deal of my day trying to find something to do this and I thought that I'd found something useful in phonegap but it requires using the application on an Apple operating system and their online version only takes HTML. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

For a basic website, Twitter Bootstrap should suffice. In fact, Bootstrap 3's direction has gone mobile-first, making it one of the better choices for the mobile web.

Bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/

You can look into using a responsive-design Javascript library such as SenchaTouch or jQuery Mobile.

SenchaTouch: http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/

jQuery Mobile: http://jquerymobile.com/

They are specifically designed for multiple-browser viewing purposes, allowing clients to view your content online through a mobile device.

Answer 2

As stated in the comments by @NSPunk, you need to develop a native iOS app on the mac os x platform. That being said the easiest way to make your is to use the UIWebView Class which allows you to embed the web content into a native app. But as pointed out in the comments, unless you add on functionality to this web view, Apple is most likely going to reject it from inclusion in the app store.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/reference/UIWebView_Class/Reference/Reference.html

Other than that, you can make a mobile version specific to iOS devices of your site using meta tags like so

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320px" />
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="./apple-touch-icon.png" />

This gives a native experience without actually having to go through the app store. To me, this is the way I would go if all you want to do is make your web app more iOS friendly with your existing knowledge of php/mysql.

http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/appleapplications/reference/SafariHTMLRef/Articles/MetaTags.html

If you do decide to go this route, here is a good php class I found to detect iOS devices.

php MobileDetect