Sneak Peek into new ForumApps feature

Aayush

Aayush

Well-known member
Imagine the amount of hours you have put in developing your forum, nurturing your audience, investing in the right addons and moderating poor content. Are you happy with the performance of your forum? Don’t you think it can perform better? What do you think is stopping your forum from reaching its potential? Are your users fully satisfied with the way they access your forum?

When your forum users get the best user experience, it ensures that are constantly active on the forum. They want to always be on top of the latest happenings in the forum and must be able to participate comfortably using any device. When it comes to using forums on mobile, there have been many concerns among users. They find it difficult using the forum mobile website as it is difficult to post replies and get alerts. To keep your forum members active and engaged at all times, a mobile app is a must in 2017.

“I’m not too worried about the app being a webview, but my users find replying/posting via the xenforo posting section a pain on their mobiles, when compared to say something like tapatalk. Is there anything available that makes posting easier, more tapatalk/native app like?”
- tajhay, Xenforo Forum - Apr, 2016

To keep access to their addons, many forum owners have opted for webview instead of a native app. Till now, having a native app meant sacrificing the ease of using addons with the app. Users would have to leave the app for using various addons. This meant users were less engaged and ended up spending less time on the forums.

But with ForumApps, this is no more the case. Now users can access the media gallery, shoutbox, resources or any page your website is using from within the app. This means that users can now stay on top alerts with push notifications, regularly engage with threads they follow and stay updated about their favorite topics right on their home screens. We’ve devised a secure way to login to the website when using the app, which feels seamless and avoids the hassle of multiple logins. Take a look for yourself.

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​

This perfect combination of a native app with access to existing addons is the solution that forum owners have been waiting for. Now there is no excuse to not have a ForumApps for your forum. Let us know what you guys think and to know more visit https://forumapps.net/
 
Aayush said:
Imagine the amount of hours you have put in developing your forum, nurturing your audience, investing in the right addons and moderating poor content. Are you happy with the performance of your forum? Don’t you think it can perform better? What do you think is stopping your forum from reaching its potential? Are your users fully satisfied with the way they access your forum?

When your forum users get the best user experience, it ensures that are constantly active on the forum. They want to always be on top of the latest happenings in the forum and must be able to participate comfortably using any device. When it comes to using forums on mobile, there have been many concerns among users. They find it difficult using the forum mobile website as it is difficult to post replies and get alerts. To keep your forum members active and engaged at all times, a mobile app is a must in 2017.

“I’m not too worried about the app being a webview, but my users find replying/posting via the xenforo posting section a pain on their mobiles, when compared to say something like tapatalk. Is there anything available that makes posting easier, more tapatalk/native app like?”
- tajhay, Xenforo Forum - Apr, 2016

To keep access to their addons, many forum owners have opted for webview instead of a native app. Till now, having a native app meant sacrificing the ease of using addons with the app. Users would have to leave the app for using various addons. This meant users were less engaged and ended up spending less time on the forums.

But with ForumApps, this is no more the case. Now users can access the media gallery, shoutbox, resources or any page your website is using from within the app. This means that users can now stay on top alerts with push notifications, regularly engage with threads they follow and stay updated about their favorite topics right on their home screens. We’ve devised a secure way to login to the website when using the app, which feels seamless and avoids the hassle of multiple logins. Take a look for yourself.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
​

This perfect combination of a native app with access to existing addons is the solution that forum owners have been waiting for. Now there is no excuse to not have a ForumApps for your forum. Let us know what you guys think and to know more visit https://forumapps.net/
Click to expand...

It's neat, it's one of the big drawbacks of a native app is that it will never be the same experience as a webview app largely due to those addons. So is this rolling out to existing app users?
 
ichpen said:
It's neat, it's one of the big drawbacks of a native app is that it will never be the same experience as a webview app largely due to those addons. So is this rolling out to existing app users?
Click to expand...
We're done with the iOS part. The android work got delayed and working on that right now.
 
ichpen said:
Cool. So this will be an automatic upgrade for existing app users when ready? Any configuration required?
Click to expand...
Would be a manual upgrade as of now. We'll email you asking the list of items you'd like to include in the app and we will take care of the rest after that.
 
Wanted to show you guys a sneak peek into the new feature we built now compatible with Android.

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Let us know what you think on https://forumapps.net/community/
 
Kintaro said:
it's really impossible to understand that this is a seamless login, please make a longer video.
Click to expand...

I would agree that we need a much longer vid, perhaps with some other XF and other addon pages although if you've seen a web view app you'll know what it does and doesn't. Problem with mixing the two is you'll lose consistency in UI and UX so some attention has to be paid to that i.e. input boxes, fields, backgrounds etc should be made consistent with your theme. That's why I think looking at the current app the inbox, notifications and profile pages are probably the only ones you'll want 'native' with the rest relying on your mobile theme and then you'll want to hide the mobile page alerts so as not to confuse the user.

My opinion, there's a lot of stuff I don't know yet about this feature.
 
ichpen said:
I would agree that we need a much longer vid, perhaps with some other XF and other addon pages although if you've seen a web view app you'll know what it does and doesn't. Problem with mixing the two is you'll lose consistency in UI and UX so some attention has to be paid to that i.e. input boxes, fields, backgrounds etc should be made consistent with your theme. That's why I think looking at the current app the inbox, notifications and profile pages are probably the only ones you'll want 'native' with the rest relying on your mobile theme and then you'll want to hide the mobile page alerts so as not to confuse the user.

My opinion, there's a lot of stuff I don't know yet about this feature.
Click to expand...
I’ll be introducing this feature officially soon. Basically when you view the website via the app, you can easily customize the design of your site from within your XenForo templates for app only. This wouldn’t affect the browser design. Knowledge of CSS is required for the same.
For example you can hide the site header with login link from the app because the app already has a sidebar with login link and the website navigation header is redundant with the header in the app.
 
Aayush said:
I’ll be introducing this feature officially soon. Basically when you view the website via the app, you can easily customize the design of your site from within your XenForo templates for app only. This wouldn’t affect the browser design. Knowledge of CSS is required for the same.
For example the site header with login links is hidden from the app because the app already has a sidebar with login link and the top header is redundant with the header in the app.
Click to expand...

Yep that's kind of where I was thinking this would go. As long as you can throw some CSS for the app view you should be able to make it usable. You just need to be weary of session and cookie handling i.e. what happens when I dump the session cache on the server and log everyone out?
 
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