ipad / iphone / android apps and skins

island

Active member
Is there a xenForo app for ipad / iphone / android to make it even easier to use?
(e.g. with a file upload app for ipad which allows you to upload photos from the pictures app)

Or is the approach to take a tablet skin?
 
Interesting. I just got an ipad, and I'm not fully up to speed with the app store culture.
My first thought was that I'd like to offer people the option of a FREE app to access my xenforo forum.

Tapatalk appears to cost $999 for an app you can offer for free for either iphone or android, or $1799 to support both right now.
http://tapatalk.com/rebranding.php

Forum Runner appears to cost$249 per year to support either iphone or android with an app you can offer your site users for free or $349, per year, to support both right now.
http://www.forumrunner.com/?p=branding

Otherwise, people can pay a few bucks and buy it themselves from the app stores and use it as a program to access multiple forums. Possibly mobile users already own it to access other forums.

Honestly, the branded app prices seem quite high to me compared to the cost of xenForo itself. I was hoping an app addon just for your xenForo site could be had for less than the price of the whole xenForo software itself.
 
Honestly, the branded app prices seem quite high to me compared to the cost of xenForo itself. I was hoping an app addon just for your xenForo site could be had for less than the price of the whole xenForo software itself.

I agree but I do understand it, as it is a white label app, E.G. has no tapatalk branding and would mean they are losing out on sales of their app... really this offer is targeted at really big forums that may have 1,000+ users who may use the app, to tapatalk at their standard rates that is £2,000 income which they are not going to get if you go whitelabel!

It would be good if there was an option to keep all of the tapatalk branding but still offer an exclusive app for free for a much lower cost as the branding stays intact but that is up to them!
 
I don't mean any disrespect to the above companies with my post above. They're obviously doing something right, well a lot of things right, to command those prices. And maybe I totally underestimate the complexity and coding time necessary to create an app.

I guess if everyone is buying the app for a few dollars times hundreds and thousands of people though, I can understand why they wouldn't lower their price. From a forum perspective, I didn't ever think of charging each new user $3 to signup, so it struck me as odd off the bat.

When I first fired up my ipad I went to an ipad forum that prompted me that an app was available and then in the app store I saw they wanted me to buy the app, so I thought "hmph" and backed out. But again, I may not understand the culture of mobile users - the devices do seem to start right from teh get-go to acclimate you to paying for apps for everything without really noticing (making you put a credit card on file with apple even to download a free app)

The only issue that makes me really want an app for the ipad that I could offer freely to forum users is the ability to upload photos easily from the apple photo app since it appears mobile safari won't let you select a file using a normal file upload on a web page. Other than that, I think a simplified skin would do fine with slightly larger buttons and such (for last post, etc.) and slightly different menuing to account for the smaller screen.
 
I'm currently *entertaining* the idea of creating a native iPhone app that interacts with my XenForo installation in a unique way. I'll be sure to post here on the forums about it if it actually goes live. The app itself will function for more then just reading the forums, it will also interact with a specilly crafted database and such, but maybe I'll release the classes I write for the message board portion only.

I really disagree with the above pricing - if I were to do something similar I would charge $99 for the app project files, and a minor fee for major upgrades (if any major upgrades were to ever occur). That's what I find fair - especially if you want the App released under your company's name and have to pay another $99 fee for releasing it to the store.
 
I'm currently *entertaining* the idea of creating a native iPhone app that interacts with my XenForo installation in a unique way. I'll be sure to post here on the forums about it if it actually goes live. The app itself will function for more then just reading the forums, it will also interact with a specilly crafted database and such, but maybe I'll release the classes I write for the message board portion only.

I really disagree with the above pricing - if I were to do something similar I would charge $99 for the app project files, and a minor fee for major upgrades (if any major upgrades were to ever occur). That's what I find fair - especially if you want the App released under your company's name and have to pay another $99 fee for releasing it to the store.
Let us know how it goes. Sounds interesting.
I find the problem with these apps is that they only cover a portion of the site, in your case the forum. We have sites that have front end content, forum, and other sections that generate contents.
Sort of hiring a company to build a special app to do them all, I don't find making an app forum, app for front page content, etc a good solution.
 
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