Modern web UI is nice, but at the end of the day when it comes to mobile, apps are still king.
If the purpose of this is to replace the interaction we had on Yammer, a mobile app is a necessity. Ease of use is critical, and navigating via browser does not give the features and interactivity that the Yammer app does. App specific notifications for replies, quickly navigating to favorite topics/groups. Just because it can be used in a mobile browser doesnt mean it should.
I see lack of a mobile app as a real barrier to winning user adoption and getting the most participation possible based on the proven success of Yammer Office 365 Network.
66 Comments
Allen, great to know that is not refused at all, thanks for sharing.
- Allen
Community Manager
Status changed:NewtoUnspecifiedHi all,
Building an App for the Microsoft Tech Community is something we certainly want to investigate, however at this time the team are focused on the Microsoft Ignite and Microsoft Tech Summit events that are coming up. We are currently planning to look more seriously at developing a Microsoft Tech Community app before the end of this calendar year.
Once we have an understanding of the work involved we will make a decision on if and when building an app would be feasible and share that with the community as soon as we can.
Please do continue to share your idea's as this will help us make a useful set of requirements for such an app.
Cian, thank you for the info. Thus no technical limits now, only budgeting and resources. Hope we will have native app one day, responsive design is not very suitable for sites like this
I was curious about this as well, so I checked and the software that this site is based on (Lithium) doesn't support mobile apps, after focusing on a responsive design instead for the last few years. However, they have introduced an Android SDK which went GA in May and an iOS SDK is on the cards as well, so mobile apps for the Microsoft Tech Community might be much more likely/practical at that point, wouldn't that be good?
- Is it just me, but I really would like to have MS tech community app on mobile with quick access to favorite spaces, notifications and other cool stuff. Even though the webpage has responsive design, real app features are missing
And which status was before?
- Status added:New
Hi Arunas,
Nope, you are not alone. Similar idea which is somewhere here was introduced at very beginning of TechComm and after that discussed several times. Current answer is
<here are no plans for a mobile app at this time but it is one of the most requested features - we hear the feedback.>
100% agree. Used to love the yammer network. Don't often bother with this web one. It's not as easy to track my interests and not as convenient on mobile. Used to love the push notifications
- Ivan I couldn't agree more. My involvement has gone from a 4-6 hours per day (old Office 365 Network on Yammer), to less than an hour per month. And this is 100% related to the fact that I can no longer switch networks and follow the conversations on my mobile. Being in a different timezone, I am never sitting at my office desk (web) at night when the US Microsoft team and collaborators are online. It's so sad.
Hi Anna,
thank you for the honest feedback. As said adove, no ETA is required. Judging from the bullet list I'm not expecting anything before 2018 on this regard, and that's OK, so as long as we know where this is roughly headed.
I'm fairly certain that a mobile app is mostly requested by PowerUsers which explains the lower prioritization on your end. On the other I do hope this gets a bump, since those PowerUser were, and still are, very important contributors to this network.
Ivan54 Thanks for pushing us, we really do appreciate it! We have every intention of working on a mobile app but we are under pressure to deliver a large number of improvements to the existing site and a focus on a mobile app will divert resources away from those improvements. These are our urgent community-wide priorities:
- Blog prominence so big product announcements aren't buried
- Private inbox & notifications alerts so you can better discern between the two (they are combined at the moment)
- Profile pages that you can use to showcase all of your latest conversations, replies, RSS blog feed, events you plan to attend
- Updated community experience to support major events like Microsoft Ignite and Microsoft Tech Summits
- Private communities to support invite-only NDA groups
- Styling for floated posts (right now you can't tell a post is floated)
- Sharing on social (so you can easily share on Twitter, LinkedIn etc)
- Registration experience (needs improvement in helping new members join multiple communities)
- Ideas styling needs improvement to support products who are considering opting out of UserVoice
We know the lack of a mobile app makes it difficult to be responsive in the community and it's because of this have this item committed to our roadmap. It would be unfair for me to give you an ETA when we are still trying to deliver on the above.
I guess they follow "never say never" principle...
