This is the second time this happened to me: probably after an update, either of the system or my browser, the web apps I made stopped working.
What happened there?!
Making new ones is quite a lot of work. Is there a way to salvage them?
I couldn’t find earlier posts on this subject, hence this topic.
It may help to elaborate on “stopped working”.
Yeah, sure. When i click the icon the desktop disappears and nothing else happens after that.
The ‘batch’ files that contain the info (icon, location, etc) are still in the proper directory.
This happened to me before, and I ended up creating all my web apps anew.
Does the problem persist after a reboot?
Sometimes I get the “kernel half-hang” bug and apps just plain don’t open until I reboot.
Not nice. 
Can you give an example pathname of the file that contains the info - and the contents therein?
I don’t know how this works (i.e. how it is implemented) but if this happened to me for a .desktop file, I would scrounge out the Exec line and manually run the command at the shell prompt - to see whether a) I get an error or b) it works.
I would also look to see whether a browser is running both before and after you click the icon.
Rebooting makes no difference whatsoever.
There is no browser running, neither before nor after the click.
The files are in .local/share/applications.
The command executed is
flatpak run – commad=angelfish-webapp – filesystyem=/home/purism .local/share/applications/org.kde.angelfish buienradarnl_-buienradarnl-weer-_actuele_neerslag_weerbericht_weersverwachting_sneeuwradar_en_satellietbeelden.desktop
OK, that command has a mass of typos but I am going to assume that that is due to a combination of forum butchering (you need to enclose such material in backquote characters when putting it in a post) and the fact that you didn’t cut and paste it directly into the forum.
Otherwise if you had the correct command, entering it at the shell prompt may have merit, as suggested.
For clarity, which browser are you expecting it to launch?
I had to retype the command on my laptop after reading it from my phone. And I was in a hurry. Hence the errors.
There are no errors in the original: it worked until a week or two ago.
The browser is Angelfish.
What happens when you type the command at the shell prompt on your phone? Do you get an error? The same behaviour only?
Does Angelfish work at all?
Posting the contents of the .desktop file would also point us in a good direction since that’s what’s running inside the flatpak container.
If an update is suspect, it can’t hurt to apt update && apt upgrade again, then reboot just to be sure everything’s as up to date and “normal” as expected. Partial upgrades can leave a system in weird states sometimes, though in something like Angelfish it may be depending on a service running in the background. I’ve never used it so I’m not sure.
The webapps themselves aren’t in ~/.local/share/applications, are they? That’s where the .desktop files or other launchers go, but the actual binaries and source code belong somewhere else. I usually symlink launchers, scripts, or binaries from ~/.local/bin and add it to my $PATH. The desktop file also seems to have a very long name. It shouldn’t be a technical problem, but it does open yourself up to mistyping the filenames. There could be a typo somewhere preventing your webapp from launching.
After updating the contents of ~/.local/share/applications, you typically need to update some sort of cache that updates menus, etc. In KDE, this is done with the kbuildsycoca6 tool. (5 if on KDE 5) (Yes, I triple-checked that weird name!) KDE and GNOME both typically update this cache every so often on their own, but there’s not much control over when it does it, so it’s better to force the cache update when needed.
As an aside, I get around that problem by using ssh to connect from my desktop/laptop to the phone. So, for example, you can cat a file that is on the phone and then directly cut-and-paste from the output to the forum (or wherever).
It is annoying that gnome-epiphany does not support web apps anymore, neither does firefox, while google chrome does on the L5
Yeah, you are right, that is the way to go. But I never made ssh a habit. I have set it up, but I keep forgetting how to use it, so I have to look it up every time I want to use it. Since I am too lazy to do that… Etcetera.