Is it possible to convert an electron app to a web app?

Question

As far as I understand:

Electron allows a javascript/html/css app to use web technologies in a desktop environment.
What I have also found is that most web apps can be converted to a desktop app using electron.
My real goal is to do so with either vscode or atom. The reason is that I really like both of them, and would like to run them on an android device.

What I have already tried:

atom-in-orbit and here are my steps and the errors thrown:
1. Clone commit/version 089fa92117f5d0ead54b56ee208a2baa24d9c4e2 of atom because of it's definition in line 49 of build.js
2. Attempt to build and get an "ENOENT"(Previously posted about here) error about the patching part on lines 50 and 56 of build.js
3. Patch these manually with the patches in patches/src
4. Try the build process again and, again get another error about the missing node modules in the atom src.
5. Attempt to run the build process in the atom source, because this installs all the modules that atom is dependent of, and I got an error here about the apm installation the particular errors can be found here

npm ERR! git clone --template=C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache\_git-remotes\_templates --mirror    

After this I did not try anything else with atom-in-orbit

Apart from that, to be honest I have never developed a web app and have never touched javascript or html or even really looked at css for a long time.
With vscode I was never even able to compile this into an electron app in the first place.

My question(s)

Is it possible to convert an electron app into a web app.
How does atom-in-orbit work inside to try to replicate this behavior.
Have I just done some blind research and missed a atom-for-android or vscode-for-android app? Edit: Also, could phonegap be used to try this? Thanks, any help is always appreciated!

Solution

The answer is, it strongly depends on applications.

As you already found out, Electron is the technology based on web platform. Some small Electron apps like Todoapp (eg. https://github.com/jaystack/repatch-example-electron-app) are almost the same as the web, so you can tweak some in /src and get it work easily on web as well. However, some other massive applications like VSCode or Atom are not always the same. You might need to dig into and tweak source codes a lot in order to port it into web. If you read and write JavaScript, you can do that, it would be a hardship though.

Comments

[Heath Mitchell]

Try github.com/cdr/code-server