MattW
Administrator
There are no plans to add support for tapatalk or any other app - we have a mobile optimised style you can choose to use in the style selector at the bottom of the forum page.
Tapatalk integaration
- Thread starter AbhishekS
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IceAgeComing
Retired Administrator
- Joined
- May 26, 2013
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- Brussels, Belgium
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- Scotland
- Online Cricket Games Owned
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- Don Bradman Cricket 14 - PS3
- Don Bradman Cricket 14 - Steam PC
then your phone must be awful: because it has worked on everything I've tried (Android 2 on some awful HTC thing: Android 4? on a Galaxy G4 and various iOS versions; collectively the vast majority of the mobile browsing market).
If I can remember arguments against tapatalk (never used the thing since I use a grand total of two forums: SA has its own user-developed mobile app and PC has the mobile site): its that part of their way of making it free is by selling ads that go to them rather than running the ads that the forums themselves run. If you use that way to adapt to a mobile platform, then you lose revenue. Could be wrong, though!
Its not like not having a mobile app is a radical thing: reddit don't have an official one and just develop a standard mobile browser app. People have made their own apps that people use to access it in a more mobile-friendly way which (based on other people, I don't use reddit) seems to work well since the blame for it not working is not with reddit, but with the app developer.
I know how useful a good forum app could be: (awful app is one of the most-used apps on my phone because of how good it is); but if the mods tried to do it themselves then they'd probably get a bunch of complaints about it "not working" as it was being developed by dumb people who know nothing about how programme development work: and you'd have to consider it when you wanted to make forum changes. It'd be another code base to maintain: and probably turn into an annoyance if it ever randomly broke when you added a subforum or something. The only way something like that would ever happen would be if it was crowd developed by forum users who were responsible for the thing breaking and didn't run ads on the thing to steal money from the admins of the site. I don't think that PC has the numbers to make something like that worthwhile: although I'd be happy to be proved wrong!
If I can remember arguments against tapatalk (never used the thing since I use a grand total of two forums: SA has its own user-developed mobile app and PC has the mobile site): its that part of their way of making it free is by selling ads that go to them rather than running the ads that the forums themselves run. If you use that way to adapt to a mobile platform, then you lose revenue. Could be wrong, though!
Its not like not having a mobile app is a radical thing: reddit don't have an official one and just develop a standard mobile browser app. People have made their own apps that people use to access it in a more mobile-friendly way which (based on other people, I don't use reddit) seems to work well since the blame for it not working is not with reddit, but with the app developer.
I know how useful a good forum app could be: (awful app is one of the most-used apps on my phone because of how good it is); but if the mods tried to do it themselves then they'd probably get a bunch of complaints about it "not working" as it was being developed by dumb people who know nothing about how programme development work: and you'd have to consider it when you wanted to make forum changes. It'd be another code base to maintain: and probably turn into an annoyance if it ever randomly broke when you added a subforum or something. The only way something like that would ever happen would be if it was crowd developed by forum users who were responsible for the thing breaking and didn't run ads on the thing to steal money from the admins of the site. I don't think that PC has the numbers to make something like that worthwhile: although I'd be happy to be proved wrong!
MattW
Administrator
Yeah - ad revenue is a factor. We have to rely on ads to pay our bills - it's the only way other than subscriptions to make a forum work. With mobile growing as a factor, we can't afford to be ad-free on one platform.
Beyond that - it's a matter of forum experience. We've got a huge amount of customisations over the default vBulletin, I can modify the mobile site to bring those in where they make sense, but with something like Tapatalk, you have to take what you get - and if something goes wrong, I can't fix it.
Custom apps would solve that - but a bunch of members are running on Blackberries or old Symbian phones - we've even had visitors on PS Vita, Firefox OS and Bada. The diversity of our members is matched by the diversity of their devices - a website is the only solution that covers that.
Beyond that - it's a matter of forum experience. We've got a huge amount of customisations over the default vBulletin, I can modify the mobile site to bring those in where they make sense, but with something like Tapatalk, you have to take what you get - and if something goes wrong, I can't fix it.
Custom apps would solve that - but a bunch of members are running on Blackberries or old Symbian phones - we've even had visitors on PS Vita, Firefox OS and Bada. The diversity of our members is matched by the diversity of their devices - a website is the only solution that covers that.
AbhishekS
Chairman of Selectors
- Joined
- Dec 10, 2008
- Location
- Mumbai, India
- Online Cricket Games Owned
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- Don Bradman Cricket 14 - Steam PC
How about using the Tapatalk APIs to make your own forum app and making it a paid app? Forums like XDA do support Tapatalk, but they also have their exclusive apps (based on Tapatalk) and are paid apps.
Users like me who prefer Tapatalk over browser can purchase it from the Play Store. Even if priced at somewhere around $1-$3, it would be a decent source of income for you guys.
Users like me who prefer Tapatalk over browser can purchase it from the Play Store. Even if priced at somewhere around $1-$3, it would be a decent source of income for you guys.
MattW
Administrator
Because we have a perfectly functional mobile site without going to all the effort of redeveloping every aspect of it into an app. Much larger sites would have enough users benefiting from that and perhaps a return on the investment of the time to develop it - but we don't.
I'd imagine most places with paid Tapatalk apps are just using their off the shelf packaged apps, which charge a monthly fee on top of store fees - there don't seem to be many outside implementations of the API.
It's just not at all a priority - I'm very happy with the quality and functionality of the mobile site - and if we were about to start putting a lot of effort into programming something, it'd be an updated Fantasy Cricket system - not mobile apps.
I'd imagine most places with paid Tapatalk apps are just using their off the shelf packaged apps, which charge a monthly fee on top of store fees - there don't seem to be many outside implementations of the API.
It's just not at all a priority - I'm very happy with the quality and functionality of the mobile site - and if we were about to start putting a lot of effort into programming something, it'd be an updated Fantasy Cricket system - not mobile apps.
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