The Real Reason Businesses Love Tablets

September 29, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

But why? Why are businesses embracing tablets, often choosing to equip their workforce over laptops? Much has been written about why businesses are enamored with tablets, but we don’t think they’re quite getting it right. Let’s examine some of the theories out there and see if we can figure out the real reason tablets are winning the workforce.
ipad-820272_1280

“Tablets Provide Mobile Productivity!”

businessbee.com wrote in a roundup of the benefits of tablets in the workplace:
In the modern business world, telecommuting has become the norm and more employees are completing tasks while out of the office. One of the best ways to accommodate this trend is to provide employees with tablets for work. If a sales rep is traveling to a meeting, they could check the status of customers and go over their presentation to refresh their memory of key points. If they are out of town on a business trip, an employee could still work on a project and maintain communication just as effectively as if they were in the office.

This is a nice theory, but why would tablets trump laptops here? When we think productivity, we don’t immediately think tablets which are great to consume media, but less great at creating media since it lacks a dedicated keyboard, lacks a mouse, and using your fingers to input on a flat slate quickly gets tiring. Ever type more than a couple emails on those flat, small bluetooth keyboards? No thank you.
Sure, tablets are lighter than most laptops, and that’s a fair argument. If your worker is constantly on the road, shaving a couple pounds off is a blessing. But ultralight laptops exist, providing far more horsepower and usability, and many are comparable in price with these new tablets, coming in at under $800. It’s not enough to say tablets make workers more mobile. Laptops have done that for years.

“Immediate, Anytime, Anywhere Connection to the Internet!”

This doesn’t even seem like a real reason, but it was cited in a couple different articles touting tablets as the business tool of the future. Obviously, this is a stretch. Laptops can also get online anywhere. Phones can too; arguably easier than tablets since phones almost always have a data connection in addition to WiFi, and it’s very simple to tether a phone to a laptop via various apps. In fact, since it’s harder to tether a tablet to a phone for data connections, laptops might trump tablets in terms of connectivity.
Let’s move on.

“They’re Cheaper!”

Maybe. First of all, the new iPad Pro costs $800 for the base model and that doesn’t include the stylus or the keyboard. Add in those, and you’re close to a grand. And let’s not forget buying necessary apps such as Microsoft Office or Apple’s competing apps like Keynote (admittedly, included for free on new iPad Pros) that make the device business-ready.
Outfitting your employees with tablets may be slightly cheaper than handing out ultralight laptops, but not by much. And since not all employees are road warriors, some will be fine with much cheaper regular-sized laptops or even, gasp, desktops. You can buy them in bulk from Dell and save a lot of cash. Money is always a good argument, but less convincing in this case.

The Real Reason Businesses Want Tablets

person-731479_1280
It’s not about cost. It’s not about increased productivity, or connectivity, or even really the mobility. The real reason tablets fit well for the workplace is what we already intuitively know, and why tablets are also great for toddlers: ease of use.
Everything about a tablet converges on ease of use. It hardly ever crashes. Upgrades/updates happen with the push of an icon. The battery lasts forever. You need to run specific software, you push an icon and it’s there. Furthermore, everyone is familiar with a tablet and how to operate it. Even if you’ve never owned one, you probably have a smartphone in your pocket and the tablet is just that but bigger. So all of a sudden, there’s nothing you need to do to train an employee. Mac/PC backgrounds are basically obsolete. You hand an employee either an iPad Pro or a Surface Pro and they’re just as easy to use: push an icon.
The ease of use factor is the silver bullet to the argument of having tablets in the workplace, and it all stems from mobile phones and apps being ubiquitous in today’s environment. We’re already all trained on the device and are used to apps, so it’s just as easy for your new salesperson to use a tablet to show a customer something, and just as easy for your customer to take the tablet and manipulate whatever is on-screen. This smooth business-to-employee-to-client interaction can’t be stressed enough in its importance. It’s a brand new way of approaching business interactions, business training, and companies are catching on to how beneficial this process actually is.
Technology simplified is a game-changer. When the same app and device can be used by upper management down to the workers on the factory floor, that’s a real productivity boost, much more so than “being mobile.” This article from informationweek.com describes tablets in action with the DEA and with workers at GE and it’s a fascinating read. Notice how the agents in the field and the supervisors on the floor use this simplified technology to get work done. It’s a great illustration of how technology for the “everyman” is changing business.
What do you think? Are there other compelling arguments that are better than ours for having tablets in the workplace? Sound off in the comments.
RFS-Banner-LinkedIn

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

4 Ways to Improve Offline Mobile Apps

September 22, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

Raise your mouse (or thumb, if you’re mobile) if your smartphone has a data connection at all times. Probably not too many of you can say this. We certainly can’t. Either we lose reception on the subway, or our homes are lined with lead paint, or we are on Sprint for some strange reason. Whatever the reason might be, we lose data all the time. But does that mean we have to lose the ability to use your app?
Look, we’re not looking for magic. No data means no internet, so of course we wouldn’t expect new emails to load or be able to search through Google. But your app should still retain some functionality when offline. We’ve seen poorly designed apps appear blank, crash, or not even start up when offline. This leads to poor user experience, of course, but also a huge missed opportunity for companies to engage with their customers even when there’s no data connection. So how can we do better?

1. Save the last state.

Here’s a tale of two apps made for content delivery:
offline reader apps
Both were launched in airplane mode. Which provides a better experience? The CNN app on the right saved our last view and provides us with the headlines for the articles that were last loaded. That’s not all. A long press on an article will give the option to star it, saving it to be read later when internet becomes available again. On the left? Nothing. Don’t be afraid to let your app cache a little data to provide a good offline experience.

2. Compartmentalize online and offline features.

There are features on every app that should work without an internet connection. One of our favorite apps in this area is Evernote. Even in the free version, the app is entirely functional offline: you can edit old notes or write a new one, and the app will sync everything up with the cloud once you’re connected again. You don’t even notice online/offline status when using this app.
But there are plenty of apps that astoundingly lose all functionality when offline. We’ve come across 1-player games that won’t let you play without an internet connection. We’ve seen a NYC subway map app that couldn’t even display the subway map without being online. Or how about when you launch the restaurant locator of a certain burrito chain’s app:
2015-09-22 05.08.45
What? Why wouldn’t it at least have a generic map of locations? Why couldn’t it use your smartphone’s last know location to pop up a map? Can’t they imagine a scenario where a user is on the subway without internet and looking for a place to eat once he or she is above ground? The zip code search on the map should be compartmentalized from the general map itself, or even just provide a text list of locations. The offline user experience can be better and more engaging in this way.

3. Allow users to download offline functionality.

Recently while traveling abroad, Google Translate became an important app to communicate with locals. Internet was spotty and roaming costs were/are atrocious so it was a good thing that the app allowed us to download language packages while we had Wi-Fi. Even though the downloads were fairly large (approaching 200MBs), it was great to have them offline and we knew we could always delete them once our traveling was over.
2015-09-22 05.26.18
If possible, design your app to take advantage of downloading packs in this way for offline use. Amazon Prime and now the cable channel EPIX allow their customers to download videos for offline viewing, and we feel this trend will continue as apps mature. What portion of your business’ app can be downloaded to be functional later when offline?

4. Build with offline-mode as a priority.

Too many apps we’ve used crash when we suddenly lose data connectivity. It’s like the developers never expected the online status to change mid-use, which is something that happens all the time. This problem, and the other problems mentioned previously, stem from developers not considering offline use from the get-go. A report by Forrester said:
…developers strive to satisfy customers in their mobile moments, but cannot make assumptions about the constancy, quality, or even existence of an individual’s network connection. Therefore, offline support will be a crucial consideration for nearly every future modern application. Unfortunately, our experience shows that offline support is the mobile app feature continually under scoped by developers and oversimplified by stakeholders.
If you want to reach your users as often as possible, delivering a good offline experience is a large part of the equation. Make sure your app functions offline as well as it possibly can, and you’ll see higher levels of customer satisfaction as well as customer loyalty.
RFS-Banner-LinkedIn

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

3 Reasons Why Enterprises Need a Mobile Game Plan

September 16, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

This is a scenario that will see many large companies being left in the dust if they don’t have a solid strategy in place now, and it’s already happening: we all know big businesses doing well at mobile, and big businesses doing it terribly. Enterprises need to step up their game. Unconvinced? Here are three reasons why enterprises need a mobile game plan, ASAP.

1. Enterprise apps will soon be a $100 billion revenue opportunity.

According to a report by Emergence Capital, the mobile ecosystem around enterprise apps is about to hit $100 billion, and the better your company is at mobile, the better poised it will be to take more out of that giant pie. There are already a lot of movers and shakers vying for big paydays in mobile (see the chart below), and not investing in mobile strategy now will result in your competition eating your lunch.
Screen-Shot-2015-09-08-at-9.19.03-AM
Right now, only an estimated 20% of over 3 billion workers globally have access to mobile technology that will help them work more efficiently. This is the untapped market that can, and will, embrace mobile apps, and this group is what makes up the $100 billion opportunity. And keep in mind, as we’ve mentioned previously, users quickly settle into the apps they most want to use with little variation over the years, so there is a big impetus to arrive on the scene first in your vertical to capture their attention. A good mobile strategy will position your enterprise to provide the right productivity app at this crucial time.

2. Millennials will be reached through mobile app marketing.

All those hipster kids growing up paying $4 for a coffee? Yeah, they’re in charge now and hold the purse-strings of our economy. If your enterprise wants to succeed, you’ll have to find a way to reach this group of people that outnumber the Baby Boomers by nearly 10 million and are rapidly taking over the workforce. And they’re not going to be marketed to by newspapers and TV ads like their parents. Their tastes are so diverse and varied, the only way to really reach this generation in any meaningful way is to get six inches from their face via the ubiquitous smartphones.
85% of Millennials own a smartphone, which actually seem low to us. Of these owners, the vast majority have performed some transaction on their devices; 74% have purchased a product on their smartphone or tablet. To earn their attention, enterprises will need to think through the utility that they provide. Sure, you might capture their attention with a smart ad campaign, but if you want sustained engagement with this audience, you’re going to have to provide a reason and purpose for them to come back, and it comes down to how useful your app is to Millennials.
If we really get down to brass tacks, your mobile app will either save or sink your business in the next five years. Traditional advertising is on its last legs and to reach today’s buyers, you need a killer app. It’s a simple yet terrifying prospect, but enterprises that figure out how to be indispensable to Millennials are going to earn their business in the long run.

3. Workers are mobile so your company needs to be too.

The number of companies focused on mobile tech for enterprises expanded by 20% in the last year. The reason these new companies are seeing a big opportunity is two-fold: 1) More and more workers are embracing a “deskless” work life, and 2) Technology is reaching more traditionally mobile workers.
startup-593324_1280
In the former case, the rise of mobile devices have allowed people to work from home, in coffee shops, or on the road. We’re not bound to cubicles anymore; our devices can access everything we need anywhere, anytime. Since we’re constantly on the go, even at work, enterprise mobile apps perfectly fill that productivity need.
In the latter, traditionally on-the-move workers like nurses who are constantly making their rounds, or construction crews that travel from site to site, can be catered to with mobile apps specific to their industry and needs. Before mobile tech, these workers had to rely on pen and paper, but now they are potential tech customers if the right app is presented to them.
Does your enterprise have a mobile app strategy in place? If not, start today by evaluating your vertical and seeing who the top mobile players are. With the amount of revenue at stake, and with the erosion of non-mobile advertising, this is a dangerous time to ignore the signs and fall behind in the app race.
If you’re part of an enterprise-level company, or swiftly becoming that size, a solid mobile app game plan is essential to the success of your business. While enterprises have made great strides in launching apps for their employees and customers in the last few years, there’s still a wide gap between what is available and what is needed. This is why Gartner forecasts the“demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to deliver them.”

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

4 Questions to Ask Before Porting Mobile Apps to Tablets

September 8, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

Your team has developed a great mobile app for smartphones. Are you ready to port it over to tablets? Before you start optimizing your app for a larger screen, make sure you understand the behavior of today’s tablet users because it might not be as clear cut as it once was. Here are four questions to ask yourself before porting mobile apps to tablets.

1. Is This App Entertaining?

Today, there is a clear divide in how people use smartphones vs tablets. Generally, people reach for their iPhone or Android device for utilitarian purposes like messaging or emailing, or looking up things like restaurant reviews or movie times. In fact, that makes up 45% of mobile usage on smartphones. It makes sense. The phone is our map, calculator, watch, communicator, etc on the go, and we’re used to reaching for it to look up information or message someone.
On the tablet, we see a different pattern of behavior with users. Most of our activity on these devices is playing games, listening to music, or watching TV and videos. It is an entertainment device, most in use when we’re relaxing. The larger screen is specifically made for consuming content during our downtime, and much more than our phone, we use it mostly for entertainment apps.
man-791049_1280
So ask yourself if your app is something users will be entertained by. Games and streaming media apps make perfect sense, but an app that’s more utilitarian won’t get as much use on a tablet as it will on a smartphone.

2. Is This App Mobile?

Users don’t see tablets as a “mobile” device anymore. A 2014 Mobile Behavior Report showed that only 14% of consumers associate the word “mobile” with their tablets and e-readers. People use their tablets at home 78% of the time. It might as well be plugged into the wall at this point.
As the tablet has matured, the niche it occupies is as an at-home device people use to consume content after work or on weekends. It’s closer to laptops than phones in our minds, and have their place usually on a bedroom nightstand or coffee table. And because we don’t really travel with it, apps that people use at home will succeed the most. As the readwrite.com article put it:
“Tablets, on the other hand, are considered more stationary and at-home and we use them with “browsing” state of mind. Usage of the larger device tends to be more passive, because people associate them with watching videos, movies and reading.”
Two words to keep in mind there: browsing and passive. That’s how people use the device, again at home. So if your app specializes in providing information in a mobile capacity, then you should think twice before porting it over. Smartphone should house apps that are truly mobile. Tablets need apps that are for the home.

3. Is Your App for Enterprises (and is it Windows)?

As much as tablet makers want you to believe otherwise, people don’t use tablets to create much content besides video. It’s just a pain to do much more than that on a touch screen, and by the time you hook on a keyboard, you might as well be on a laptop. For the majority of tablet users, it is a consumption device.
But one segment that actually uses tablets for more than watching YouTube are enterprises. A new report by Strategy Analytics says that shipments of tablets, especially larger ones (11 inch display and up), will jump 185% in 2015 due to enterprise users. A lot of that comes in the form of Microsoft’s Surface Pro series, which has been a quiet hit growing from 1.5 million shipped in the first half of 2015, to 2.6 million in the second half. In fact, Windows’ market share grew by nearly 60%.
person-731479_1280
So clearly, your team has to ask itself whether your mobile app targets enterprise users or not. If so, porting to a tablet is a good choice…but you’ll want to create a Windows version of the app to really reach those power users. At least, until that rumored iPad Pro comes along.

4. Are Tablets Obsolete?

Is developing for tablets even worth the trouble anymore? Tablet sales worldwide are declining, despite the increase in Windows tablets cited earlier. And even when sold, they’re not being used. 1 in 10 tablet owners no longer use their tablets at all. Besides in the workplace, tablet usage is down across the board.
It seems the disparity between expectations and real-word use is a stark one: we just don’t find tablets as useful as we thought we would. With limited time and resources, is it really a good idea to have your team work on a tablet app in a declining market? The answers to the previous three questions should help you determine whether it’s worth developing: if it’s entertaining, for the home, or for enterprise companies, it has a good chance of succeeding on tablets. If not, you might want to funnel your tablet development funds to marketing your smartphone app instead.
RFS-Banner-LinkedIn

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

RocketFarm Footer Address

September 3, 2015
 
Dan Katcher

374 Congress St, Suite 204
Boston MA 02210

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

Mobilize Your Workforce: Enterprise Mobile Apps

September 2, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

Your workforce is already coming to work each day with smartphones and tablets in hand. Enterprise apps let you amplify the productivity of these hyper-networked teams. With mobile devices, workers can communicate and collaborate from just about anywhere; Rocket Farm knows how to build the apps that harness these connections.
Our enterprise apps will let you improve your workflow management, gather data in the field, communicate across a dispersed workforce, or take your existing systems mobile. Want to create something entirely new? We can do that too.

Why Rocket Farm?

  • Conscious collaboration: Before we write a single line of code, we learn your needs inside and out. And throughout the process, we solicit regular feedback to ensure the final product is exactly what you’re looking for. We’re experts at business requirements and process, not just technology.
  • Seamless connections: We’re here to enhance your workflow, not make it more complicated. Our apps integrate impeccably with your existing software and systems.
  • Interface plus intelligence: When you open one of our apps, you see a beautifully designed, intuitive interface. What you don’t see are the intelligently crafted and exhaustively tested systems that keep it working without a glitch.
  • Post-launch support: When you’re ready to roll out your new app to your workforce, we’ll help with the training and the technicalities.

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

4 Reasons Native Apps Are Killing Web Apps

September 1, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

Last week, Yahoo had its annual Mobile Developer Conference and shed some sobering light on the native vs web app debates, and it doesn’t look great for developers who have championed the advent of HTML5 on all our devices. More and more users are spending the majority of their time in native apps, despite the advances in mobile browser technology. How much more? Try 90% of mobile time going to apps:
time-in-apps-yahooSource: zdnet.com
So what’s the deal? Well, here are four reasons why native apps are beating out web apps.

1. Native Apps Look and Perform Better

A post on qurksmode.org puts this succinctly:
“Technically, it’s simple. The web cannot emulate native perfectly, and it never will. Native apps talk directly to the operating system, while web apps talk to the browser, which talks to the OS. Thus there’s an extra layer web apps have to pass, and that makes them slightly slower and coarser than native apps. This problem is unsolvable.”
This is something users anecdotally know as well: we just know that the Facebook app works better than Facebook’s mobile web page. It may be because they haven’t allocated enough resources to the latter, but let’s be honest: it’s Facebook. They have the resources to make each as best as they can. Rather, the web app is worse because it just can’t match the technological benefits of a native app.
facebook app vs web

2. Developing Web Apps Isn’t Easier

The big pro to web apps was the idea that a company could create one site for all devices. Unlike native apps that have to create apps for iOS and Android individually (not to mention OS versions), web apps were supposed to take the pain out of the duplicate development process.
But in practice, that not the case. Developers have quickly realized that testing a web app on difference screen sizes was a tedious task, especially since different devices have different browsers by default (not to mention browser versions). So all of a sudden, your team is running into the same QA process they would have anyway with native apps, and for an inferior product since native apps are generally better for the user.
The team over at TheLadders went through this exact issue and went native with no regrets, and it’s a great practical lesson on what you’re really getting into choosing web apps over native.

3. Native Apps Are Maturing and Succeeding

We remember a time when native apps were so unreliable, we’d have bookmarks for the mobile sites saved in case Facebook or YouTube apps were acting up. That was a long time ago. Does anyone have mobile sites bookmarked anymore? Today, native apps have matured enough to not only be a reliable mobile experience, they’re the main way we even access many websites in the first place. And the reason for this is revenue.
Native mobile apps, done right, are leading the way for companies to monetize today’s fickle web users. Forbes just had a good article looking into two corporations seeing great success with their apps: Starbucks and Under Armour. For the former, 18% of all transactions stem from mobile. For the latter, they’re gaining more than 100,000 new users per day.
2015-09-01 02.49.02
We are seeing app success stories like this all the time. How many success stories do we see of corporations with their web apps? Well, we couldn’t find any recent examples. Companies have wholeheartedly embraced native apps and making it a core part of their business (as they well should!), because it allows for a customer experience that they can control end-to-end. If web apps want this sort of development attention, it needs to put up some clear success stories that native apps can’t replicate.

4. Users Have Made Their Choice

Remember when VHS won out over the technically superior Betamax? Or when Blu-Ray won out over HD-DVD? While companies don’t have to really choose native apps over mobile apps in quite the same way as these historical format wars, the customer will. A user’s going to access Facebook in a consistent way, and once that choice is made it’s going to take a huge disruption in technology to change his or her behavior. Going back to Yahoo’s conference, another statistic cited was that “US consumers spent 35% more time on their mobile devices than the same time period last year.”
mobile-minutes-yahoo
So people are spending more time on their mobile devices and almost all that time is going to apps. We’ve made up our minds. Betamax is dead. Developers need to realize that the market has chosen its preference and now must cater to its desires. Sure, there are signs of life for web apps with the Open Web Platform and such, but let’s face it: native apps have already won. Sorry guys. Maybe HTML6 will have a silver bullet.
RFS-Banner-LinkedIn

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.