Surfable

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.

👉 Get started

🤔 How it works

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)

📖 How to add or update a website

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.

Update a website

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

Search for the app name on Surfable.app
Copy the appId from the URL for example in https://surfable.app/pwa/com.sandoche.gitnews/ it would be com.sandoche.gitnews
Edit the following file src/data/websites.js
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',
},

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.
Then just do a pull request

Add a website that does not exist

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

Edit the following file src/data/websites.js
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'
},

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
Then just do a pull request

⚙️ How to use

Clone repo:

git clone git@github.com:sandoche/Surfable-app.git

On Mac:

Install

npm install

Usage

npm run start

Development

npm run dev

Deploy to Heroku

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.

Deploy using Docker

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

Authors

👤 Sandoche ADITTANE & Farbod SARAF

Twitter: @farbodsaraf
Github: @sandoche

🤝 Contributing

Contributions, issues and feature requests are welcome!

⭐️ Show your support

Give a ⭐️ if this project helped you!

☕️ Buy me a coffee

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

sorianog/Surfable-app