Mobile style discussion

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Maximilian said:
Why critical? There are Tapatalk and Forumrunner addons, and one mobile theme in working. I think there are not a critical need of an official mobile style.
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If XenForo performed well on mobile devices, ie. iPhone, then a mobile style wouldn't be critical. There are a large number of people who do not like to use apps. This group wants either a super capable mobile style (limited capability WAP won't suffice) or an optimized full site. I'm struggling to provide either. I'm receiving a large number of complaints and it's frustrating.
 
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(Sorry for jumping into the topic... And I'm not too knowledgeable about phones... But ah well...)

There are some people that can't use apps for their phones. I use a Straight Talk phone and they locked the phones down so you can't download apps. =\ A mobile style for the forums would be nice. Something that would load quickly or something...
 
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Ranger375 said:
I won't use forum runner or tapatalk on my site just because they charge my users. To say that just because these two apps exist makes the need for a mobile app irrelevant is a ridiculous statement.
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Not a single person in this thread ever said that a mobile app was irrelevant, that's something that you've made up. What they have said is that it's not a priority and there are alternatives available and will be more quite soon. It's very possible that XenForo will come out with mobile friendly features in the future but the simple fact are there are 2 developers working on Xenforo and there's no way that they should be working on a mobile app/theme while there is so much other more important things do on the whole. It's a matter of opinions what is the most important and the company has to focus on what's going to bring it the most consumers which will inturn fund it's future development, and currently that means that mobile (as far as I'm aware from what they've said publicly) is not the most important task right now.
 
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Steve10 said:
Not a single person in this thread ever said that a mobile app was irrelevant, that's something that you've made up. What they have said is that it's not a priority and there are alternatives available and will be more quite soon. It's very possible that XenForo will come out with mobile friendly features in the future but the simple fact are there are 2 developers working on Xenforo and there's no way that they should be working on a mobile app/theme while there is so much other more important things do on the whole. It's a matter of opinions what is the most important and the company has to focus on what's going to bring it the most consumers which will inturn fund it's future development, and currently that means that mobile (as far as I'm aware from what they've said publicly) is not the most important task right now.
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That's fine, and like your opinion, my opinion is that my users shouldn't be charged to view a forum on a cell phone.
 
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An ever growing number of users, especially younger users, utilize their smartphone to browse the web and participate in forums, chats, etc., don't ask me how they manage since my HTC Hero drives me nuts when I have to type more than LOL with it, but that's what the demographics are. Not providing a official mobile style is imho misguided in the light of how consumers want to consume content.

I can appreciate that there is one(?!) 3rd party style, but (and no offense to the creator), from a business perspective a 3rd party style generated by just some guy is entirely too unreliable to utilize in a for-profit forum. So make the official mobile style a paid module, those who run forums for profit won't have any issue to pay for a needed feature when it comes with the promise of business continuity.
 
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cmeinck said:
If XenForo performed well on mobile devices, ie. iPhone, then a mobile style wouldn't be critical. There are a large number of people who do not like to use apps. This group wants either a super capable mobile style (limited capability WAP won't suffice) or an optimized full site. I'm struggling to provide either. I'm receiving a large number of complaints and it's frustrating.
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Ok but you think there are not possible to have a good unofficial mobile theme? That's the question.
 
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Can't speak for anywhere else, but I'm sure you all know that really small phones are really big over here in Japan. In fact, our web content creation business has been doing quite poorly for the past couple years precisely because people are spending more time on the phones and less time looking at computer monitors.

Background: our main client contracts with us to create website-oriented content for display on ISP sites such as Yahoo Japan. The demand for phone-oriented content has been more or less locked up by our client's comptetitors, who have stupidly priced their product so low that our client can't compete with them and hope to survive. (I hear the poor folks that are writing content for phone sites can only hope to make from 1/5th to 1/3rd what we charge. There's no way we'll by trying to break into that field.)

So we've decided to create a web presence to diversify our income sources (we've been relying too long on a single client) and hopefully drum up new business. But since our product to date has been mostly website-oriented content, our web presence plans have naturally tended to head that way as well. Given the general trend away from computer use, we are concerned that our own web presence may be less effective than we'd hope.

The upshot of all this? I'm certainly interested in seeing what XenForo may have in mind vis-a-vis mobile styles and apps. The existence of a mobile style as a standard feature in IPB was a big selling point for us; it was in fact the thing that almost broke the deal for XF. (We finally decided that we can afford to wait a while on the mobile end.) Ultimately we're going to need some sort of phone-oriented solution, even if I have to roll it myself. So I'll be watching this space closely. :cautious:
 
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Personally if a mobile style is so important to a board that it is life or death, then why switch to XenForo if you're not satisfied with the mobile browsing?

Also if a board is so dependent off a mobile style and it is a business venture then why not fork out some money to get someone to develop it. I stopped development on my style simple do to other projects popping up that were actually paid(and other personal reasons), and rather than making empty promises I wished I could fill, I decided to take a step back and continue my freelancing work.
 
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Gotcha. I can't speak for anyone else, but in our case the good aspects of XenForo outweighed the need for a mobile solution enough that we were motivated to buy. It was a close thing, and a tough decision.

One point in XF's favor was the fact that I really don't know enough about what I need from a mobile solution just yet. In Japan the mobile market is sharply divided between the smartphones and Galapagos, so I'm going to have to get my forums up and populated with some users, then find out which sort of phone they're using, before I can say for sure that a given mobile solution is what I need. It didn't make sense at this point to buy IP.B for its mobile theme if there's a chance that most of my community will be Galapagos users who can't take advantage of it.

When push comes to shove I may well do as you say and pay a pro to develop a solution. But I would prefer a built-in solution because having the XenForo team behind it ensures a degree of continuity. Add-on resources and plugins are fine for things that you'd like to have but can live without. But when it's something that you're relying on for the success of your site, built-in functionality is generally better.

So I think its reasonable for people to ask the XenForo team to consider adding a mobile solution, even though they may have thought XF worth the price of entry without one.

And when people say that mobile support is "critical" they may not simply mean "critical to the success of my site." They may be saying it's critical to the success of XenForo. Like it or not, the world is going mobile. A forum software package that takes this into account is more likely to be successful in the long run.

Even if I had no interest in running a mobile site, I might still be jumping on the bandwagon and urging the XenForo team to consider adding this functionality just because I want them to make money so they'll be around for a while.
 
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I do remember reading something about that mobile style. But to be honest, I'm not sure what I'm talking about just yet. I don't own a smartphone, and I have no idea how many of my site members will be interested in viewing their sites from either type of phone, so I'm not sure whether we'll even want an app.

For myself, I have no interest in viewing websites on a phone. I love sitting in front of my computer, and it seems to me a computer-oriented site format makes for deeper and more interesting interaction then you tend to get when folks are looking at the world through a tiny phone LCD. But that's just me; and in this respect at least I probably shouldn't let my personal preferences get in the way of what my users want.

So this is something I'm going to have to spend some time researching. That's what tipped my decision in XenForo's favor: I don't know yet, and it'll be a while before I do know, so I might as well pick the software works best for me and hope that it will have what I need to support my mobile users when the time comes to worry about them.

It's true what they say: ignorance really is bliss. :D
 
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