For starters, we have barely started to launch a few mobile applications back-ed up by a series of web services or applications. As a small company, more of our efforts are driven to sustain current customers and improve the number of features designed from beginning. Is is more an act of balancing resources and of growing in the same time.
We have ideas of what to do in the near future based on customer feed-back or market signals of potential interest but how many of those efforts will bear fruits?
There is a mixed reaction from customers – from “the interface is not compelling” to “the feature you promised is not there (yet)”.
The mobile platform we are present now (Android) has its own challenges and growing pains. The maturity of Android is hard to swallow in the long view and the gyrations regarding the platform design and support are costing you time which could be well spent on a real set of problems instead of patching “half-baked” solutions (hinting about in-app purchases, verifying apps). Coming from “don’t be evil” platform (Microsoft), the loose ends on Android SDK is becoming frustrating. Our team is investigating about moving to iPhone/iPad only to see if there is a better grasp (at Apple) on the software design problems.
Although we declared to not include ads in the apps, the sad reality, at this time, is that we have to. Since January 2017, we had included ads in the majority of the apps and had decided to continue on that path.
Another internal push is to unify a set of features for all our applications and support them on the back-end with new services. In the end, the goal is to build a mobile platform open to integrate a plethora of sensors and having a quick mirror on the phone/tablet devices.