Add splash screen for before React has started up

[prateek3255]

When the app loads it displays a white screen which seems a bit odd, so I guess you guys should add a splash screen. I would be happy do it for the android (since I don't have a mac) part using this blog, because I have done it once before.

[borisyankov]

That is true. A splash screen would look exactly as our current loading screen but without the spinning progress indicator. So a green screen with a centered Zulip logo.

[prateek3255]

Ok, so I would get started with the android part.

[prateek3255]

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[prateek3255]

@borisyankov I have already solved that issue #2705 and submitted a pull request #2743 for the same and I think that it's ready to be merged.

[gnprice]

It'd definitely be good to add a splash screen, for the reasons said above.

Here's some notes on how to approach this, adapted from #2804 (comment) :

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@borisyankov and I just took a quick look at [a third-party library for splash screens] -- and it's a pretty small amount of code. Here's the file that looks like the actual splash screen, on Android:
https://github.com/crazycodeboy/react-native-splash-screen/blob/master/android/src/main/java/org/devio/rn/splashscreen/SplashScreen.java

When the library is this small, our experience has been

• Like most things, it's probably not quite right.
• To fix the ways that it's not quite right, we're going to have to end up reading the respective Android and iOS documentation and figuring out how things are actually supposed to work.
• Once we do, it'll have been easier all around if we just write the code ourselves based on reading the docs 🙂 Because the library is so small, it's likely that the author themself didn't do much more than copy the relevant sample code from the platform docs + the RN docs, and put them together -- so we can do that instead.

I'd be glad to see a PR doing this for either Android, or iOS, or both. (The work will be pretty independent for each platform.) For Android, this means reading Android and Android Studio docs, explaining what you find, and using Android Studio to make a splash screen. For iOS, ditto with iOS and Xcode docs and using Xcode.

[chrisbobbe]

For iOS, this looks like the right starting point. I believe the "storyboard" feature uses Xcode's UI pretty heavily (a main challenge being to make the layout work on any size screen) and doesn't really rely on code, so this might be a nice (and rare) opportunity for a non-code contribution 🙂.