Oracle Visual Builder has enabled developers to package their web applications as Progressive Web Apps (PWA) for a while now providing an easy way to distribute apps for mobile devices. With these capabilities in place, having the separation of mobile and web apps in the Visual Builder design time wasn't required anymore. In fact in the new 2310 release of Visual Builder, we are hiding the mobile app option in the IDE.  The mobile option will only show up for customers who already developed a mobile app and need to continue and maintain it. Our plan is to completely remove the mobile app option in 2024. If you have a mobile app, we recommend that you simply convert it to be a web application and PWA enable the web app.

Converting the app is very simple, here are the steps:

  1. Export your existing application from inside Visual Builder (keep a copy of this file as a backup in case anything goes wrong).
  2. Extract the zip file and create a new webApps directory in the extracted folder
  3. Copy the content from under your mobileApps directory into the webApps directory
  4. In the new webApps directory remove the following files:
    • manifest.json
    • settings/appShellCache.json
    • settings/build-configurations.json
    • settings/mobile-build.json
    • mobile-build-templates/* (if it exists)
  5. Zip the webApps directory into a new zip file
  6. In Visual Builder while your mobile app is open, use the import menu option to import the webApps zip file (keep the "delete existing file and resources" unchecked)
  7. This adds the web application to your VB application
  8. Go to the web application settings -> PWA and disable and then enable the PWA support (to reset these settings)
  9. You are now ready to stage your application and open the staged app

Your new web application should function the same way as your mobile PWA app.

From the browser menu you should be able to install the app, and even create a shareable QR code that your users can use to access the new app.

After you verified that your application is working as expected feel free to remove the mobile app from your application and keep just the web one.

Here is a quick video showing the whole process of migration on a sample app:

Important note – if your app is leveraging the Oracle JET Offline Persistence Toolkit to provide offline functionality you need to publish your application using the VB grunt commands, or better yet using the package and deploy pipeline in Visual Builder Studio.