Actual mobile apps

Actual mobile apps Are really needed. As a retired technical professional I can respect the attempt to use a PWA, but with the new security measures that Apple and android are taking as well as the design of the site presenting text very small even on a large phone screen, It’s just not practical anymore.

I recently found myself with nothing but an iPhone and an android phone, no computer or tablet. And it was hard and onerous to get anything done. Navigation wasn’t working properly on either device, moving between sections was difficult, and it was also very difficult to read the screen Because of it cramming so much on the one display. And Trying to drag and re-order photos on a phone is next to impossible.

[Another topic was closed as a duplicate of this topic (https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/requests/appleiphone-app)]

Agree wholeheartedly. I basically never leave the house without bringing my laptop, and it's primarily because I never know when something will pop up that is simply too difficult to do in the PWA.

Here are a few issues with the PWA (as it presents on my iPhone) that come to mind, among others:

• No support for push notifications (I want to support guest communication by SMS, but I will not subscribe to OR's implementation of that until this is a reality, and I basically never use OR for interactive channel messaging because the lack of notifications means it's just easier to use the native Airbnb app)
• Overall poor UI for ribbon/calendar view (admittedly, the whole OR mobile site needs a significant update, but a native app can be made much more fluid
• No proper "back" button (dragging left works sometimes but not always, so frankly, just using OR in the browser is easier than the PWA)
• Inability to copy hyperlinks within the app (I have to switch to the browser so I can long-tap on a link to copy it)
• Failed page loads and unable to force quit app on bad connection (this happened to me on Wednesday--I was at a conference with bad wifi and when I opened the OR PWA, it got stuck on a partial page load and refused to update for the rest of the day, since iOS doesn't support force-quitting PWAs or force-reloading PWA "pages")

I know it's not cheap to develop apps, but OR is now a mature product and most of OR's competitors have a functional solution, so this is something OR lags significantly on.

[Another topic was closed as a duplicate of this topic (https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/requests/ios-and-android-app)]

Need an app that does push notifications so that staff member VAs and customer support team can receive them without having to log into my main airbnb and vrbo apps.

What is PWA?

I might be okay continuing to run OR on my mobile browser.

OR sends email notifications, and my email app is setup with mobile notifications. Is there additional value in a mobile app?

I would like for staff to have access to messaging "only" without having to give full OR site access. Currently I'm not aware of a way to do that.

Do we know if this is feature is in the pipeline? Not having a native OR app for hosts is severely limiting. We have not easy way to receive guest communication notifications, including SMS. 

No, no app is planned.  However, upcoming app-like notifications are discussed in this engineering webinar:

https://www.ownerrez.com/webinar-under-the-hood-4-3-2024?autoplay

So that should hopefully take care of that issue in the very near future!