Take Note: Push Notifications Added to iPhone and Android Apps

A Brand New Whiz-Bang Mobile App Experience

First, an apology: it’s taken us entirely too long to update our team collaboration mobile apps. As a small team, we suffer from the same illness most other companies do: a web/desktop-centric view of the World. We design for your large screen/large keyboard first, and then retarget for mobile. That means failed attempts at feature parity and slow progress in supporting new platforms (while early to the iPhone and iPad game, our Android release only recently came out of beta!)

So, apologies. We think we are really close to a brand new whiz-bang experience on mobile that will rock your “mobile first” socks off. Why do I sound so confident!?! Because I have the numbers to prove it!

Let’s see: we released a product with roughly 20% of the functionality a few months ago (Android) which gets 3x the average session time over our pre-existing almost feature-paritè-with-web iOS builds. Yes, 3x!

Why? Because we said “mobile first my ass!” and delivered the core functionality that matters to you in mobile: dashboard and quick access to tasks. Everything else will come in later, bit by bit and only as we see fit. No feature parity for you, sir.

Now, I know what you are going to say… your iOS codebase is buggy! I want push notifications! Why can’t I copy/paste on some fields? Etc. Etc. Etc. Are those the reasons for the 3x? I don’t believe so. Maybe .5x of it is due to it (finger in the air measurement) but what matters most is solving the needs of the mobile user, and those are different than the needs of the desktop user.

And while all those are problems that were known to us, we’re a small team that needed to ship something on Android and redesign the UI completely.

New: Push Notifications Aid Team Collaboration App

Since you read this far, I’ll share with you our latest and greatest “aha” moment: push notifications were entirely too important to ignore. Announcement: both iPhone and Android (sorry, not iPad … long story!) now have push notifications starting this week. Yipee!

And, in closing … one promise: we won’t get lost in the “mobile first” frenzy. We’ll try to deliver and build the features that make the most sense for that screen/keyboard size and usage pattern. Deal?

So, enjoy the back-ported push notifications, and here is a small little screenshot to give you a sense of things to come to improve you mobile collaboration:

Check Us Out

Follow me at @jjmata, or Teambox at @Teambox_App for the latest updates.

You can also click here to learn more about our team collaboration app.