i.e. He doesn't want to sell you on WPEngine, he wants to save your bacon and use the bacon-saving to sell other people on WPEngine ;)
Jason Cohen (their CEO) says "We'd handle the migration immediately and give him a year of free hosting to get a case study out of this."
These guys? Can't say it sounds very promising.
http://www.klonix.org/jan2012/appifier.com-20120111-104926a-...
the problem with mobile websites is that they have to compete with the app store. if an iphone user wants a train schedule, are they more likely to open up a browser and search google for "train schedule iphone" and scroll around clicking on random sites? or would they just open the app store, search for "train schedule" and easily see all available apps, ranked and reviewed, easily added to their home screen with a single click?
i run such a mobile website for metra trains (http://metra.jcs.org/) but because i have no native app in the ios or android stores, it doesn't see much traffic. i've thought about developing an app that just embeds a browser and goes to the site, just so it can be listed in the app store.
apple does in fact have a listing of mobile web apps at https://www.apple.com/webapps/ but i doubt most iphone owners even know it exists. it's also not very easy to use from mobile devices, strangely enough.
it was strange to me too at first, but we built it in response to the fact that we kept on getting asked about getting onto the "app store" by small business owners who were going digital and building Wordpress sites. Everyone wants an app nowadays - so we're filling a niche.
In the end, browsers are great but mobile safari doesn't yet let you have access to everything you can get in Cocoa. We want to open those features up to anyone with a Wordpress site.
Mike
Ugh, that makes my stomach turn, but I know it's true. And I don't fault you for capitalizing on it, but man is it irritating.
Every merchant wants an app, but their customers couldn't care less. Not that it affects your business model in any way.
The real question - are these people willing to pay $500 to say "Look ma...."?
1. What was your job.
2. How much did you get paid.
3. How much savings(runway) do you have to support this product.
Thanks!
Sorry, I know you are really interested in sharing your product but many of us want to know what people are willing to give up to chase their dreams.
Thanks again.
May I ask how you broke into dev/design consulting? I'll have to go that way too, and soon. But I'm still a bit mystified about where one finds consulting gigs... Places like ODesk/Elancer?
EDIT: Correcting typos
Also, great idea and website. Oddly enough I just heard a presentation yesterday about MobileIgniter, who amongst several other things, does something similar. They did the TechStars iOS app, which does exactly the same thing - pull blog entries from WordPress. Nice work!
Here goes my karma. Since we are doing shameless plugs here are my two (and yes I quit very high paying jobs ... 1.5~2 times more than @gozman ...):
1) Plug your business in the comments section of another post (unless it's somehow related). You will likely not get as many people seeing it and also it's kind of rude considering it diverts attention from the OP.
2) Post 2 unrelated links at once. Again, the feedback you get will not be as focused, lowering the quality of the discussion that is generated.
As far as your sites it seems like you might be offering two interesting services, but the presentation is too cluttered and spammy looking in order for me for to follow through in navigating your sites. The design of both sites evokes associations to those ad-filled parked-domains making me immediately think "I probably don't want this". Simplify would be my suggestion.
2) Yep your right. I blame my multi-tasking (programming while reading hacker news).
Your suggestion is extremely appreciated. The design is somewhat pinterest inspired which seems to attract people like my mom but infuriates programmers.
- make it obvious you are posting your own material (using phrases like "Show HN" or "I" in the title) and not try to hide that fact
- provide insight into "how" you've done it or how you are doing.
- don't do it more than once.
Follow those and HN will not downvote you to oblivion.
We think business need mobile campaigns and that most content should be more campaign centric for business.
A campaign mobile landing page is different than an app in that your trying funnel users into a transaction (signup/buy/opt-in). If your users want an app you already got them.
"2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected"
For your reference this was the complete description of the rejection:
=======
10.6
We found the user interface of your app is not of sufficient quality to be appropriate for the App Store. Apps that provide a poor user experience are not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.
Specifically, we noticed your app does not take advantage of the iOS platform. It would be appropriate to add iOS specific UI and functionality.
Please evaluate whether you can make the necessary revisions to improve the user experience of your app.
Alternatively, you may wish to consider building a web app using HTML5. HTML5 is the major new version of HTML and enables audio and video to play natively in the browser without requiring proprietary plug-ins. Using HTML5, web apps look and behave like native iPhone and iPad apps, and using HTML5's Offline Application Cache, your web apps work even when the device is offline. With web apps, you have flexibility to deliver as much or as little functionality as you desire.
If you wish to build an HTML5 web app, you can do so and distribute it directly from your web site. It is not appropriate to resubmit an HTML5 web app to the App Store.
To get started with iPhone or iPad web apps, please review Getting Started with iPhone Web Apps.
For a description of the HTML elements and attributes you can use in Safari on iPhone, check out Safari HTML Reference: Introduction.
The unfortunate thing about having a business that is at the mercy another business (such as iphone apps) is that apple can at any point block anything coming from OP's site. But thank god for competition.
There's a service called Tapatalk that does something very similar to what Appifier does, but for forums, and has a number of generated "native forum apps" in the App Store.
I'm honestly curious about the use cases for this and what extra value this provides for the user over using the website in a browser.
As for the extra value to the user, no idea, maybe they can make it easier to submit comments? No ads maybe?
I’m not questioning whether there is a market for this. I’m questioning the purpose and value to the user if it’s really nothing more than a snapshot of a dynamic site or just a site shortcut.
Of a non-mobile optimized website.
Please share some technical and transition stories. Also is the homepage a little slow, or just me?
This looks like a container similar to PhoneGap, but more specialised to some sort of feed from the WP website, perhaps RSS.
Is there really that large a market for this sort of thing?
We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.
Dave
The site looks good and the product seems interesting and useful.
Unfortunately, you're getting hit hard with HN traffic being number one on the front page currently and thus things are slow.
However I was able to load the index page and watch the introductory video.
One thing that bothers me is I clicked on your Terms of Service link and was prompted to login: you might want to consider making as much available to logged out users as possible and esp things like terms of service which I may want or even need to read before signing up.
Otherwise, best of luck!
Posting the service on HN is one of those things I wish I had thought of a few months ago, I still have a lot to learn - thankfully a friend sent me this link since he knew what we were doing. TainoApp (http://gettainoapp.com) does all that (Wordpress to native iOS app), plus full platform support for Windows Phone 7, and Android (wrapping up Blackberry and MeeGo support as of this posting) you can see it at work here - http://goo.gl/nuZcm. So far, it seems we're the only ones that can do Windows Phone 7 - hopefully someone in the community can point out other projects we haven't heard from that already does it, so that we can continue learning from others.
We have the tech specs ready for implementing support for most of the CMSs out there (Tumblr, Posterous, and others including Tresite - heavily used in latinamerica), but decided to focus on Wordpress installs first since the install base was larger we were able to churn out an mvp faster since we were more familiar with the wp architecture.
Our focus had been on engaging one on one with customers and quietly testing out different revenue models - but this kind of torrent of feedback would have been truly welcome. It wasn't until the start of the new year that we decided to test an introductory offer for the platform - aimed at the latinamerican market first (it's google translate friendly - http://goo.gl/Y5JZL). I felt we were missing a lot of the features I wanted, so I held back from doing a public push to get feedback - that was a big mistake. Seeing everyone's comments for Appifier has been an uplifting experience - so keep at it!!! One of the toughest things I've felt is being out there and being open to scrutiny by other startups. Maybe we can chat sometime and talk a bit more about some of the mistakes we've done along the way - drop me a line at jramphis at gettainoapp dot com. Best of luck!
P.S. I do like the one time charge option... I haven't seen many that have that as an ooption.
Here's a few ways that we stand out: * Our apps can be distributed on the app store like all other native iOS apps. You can even charge for these apps and we won't take a penny. * We support push notifications. You can send messages to users of an app as long as they have it installed on their phone. * All content is available offline, even when the phone is in airplane mode. * Our architechture opens up the possibility of more interesting native features (text-to-speech among other things) * You can preview your app on your phone and get a really good feel for how it will look and operate once deployed. * When your app is deployed, you can change its parameters and branding at any time. Changes are updated across your installed base instantly.
Disclaimer: I am doing similar thing and will launch soon..
rails c scaffold Post name:string .......
The rails scaffold default replies from controllers are html AND JSON.
that said, I suffer it on the Android market, where everything I search returns a thousand different apps in random order (e.g. search for Skype retrieves a dozen apps - some times Skype itself is not even the first result)
I only have two concerns. You are entirely at the mercy of Apple with this product. There isn't too much customization available so Apple may at some point decide to reject your customers apps. A lifetime membership might not help without the code for customization if you ever go offline. The second is the other players in here. I think people are going to want a lot more customization.
Either way, you've selected a market with a lot of demand. WPTouch and http://www.wiziapp.com/ are the main competitors I can think of. (WPTouch built into an app of course)
1. big market (a lot of wordpress sites run by small & medium businesses that would love an easy and cheap app) 2. practically sells itself (costs, ease of use, service) 3. if possible try to roll it out both ways (drupal and android)
Questions:
1. What about more complex and altered WP sites? 2. What will your to-market strategy be? More specifically: target customer
Again, a great idea and a very good feel for what the market needs. Congratulations!
Now for the feedback - assuming your audience is a non-tech WordPress user, I'm suggesting that you do A|B testing on the use of "Native App". From experience talking to clients on the marketing team or communications team, most don't know the difference or meaning of "native app". To them, an app is an app is an app - native or not.
The key question that these folks care about is "will my app have a custom icon that represents my brand", "can i submit to the app store", and "will my customer see this icon on their iPhone once they download it?".
So, my hypothesis is that if you strip "native app" from your copy (all of your copy) and just focus "custom app", "custom icons", "app store submission", "WordPress to iPhone", your target audience won't miss a beat and won't blink at "native app".
If you end up testing this out doing A/B tests or user research, I'd love to hear the results.
How does payment/subscription work? Is there a limit to the number of apps you can publish under the monthly plan, or is there a cost per app and then a monthly fee for the analytics and push? Is there a nice user interface for push? Where can I see a demo of it all in operation (the management of an app that's out there)? :)
A nice concept as well (btw, the hackernews effect is slowing down/timing out your site).
On a tangential note (maybe), are you also liking running the startup (a company)? I am sure developing the product would have been an awesome experience, but when it comes to manage and run the company it calls for something else. How are you liking that?
It does not add any "native" functionality though - just save people from typing URL in mobile browsers. True/false?
