The world of apps and the technologies surrounding them is changing. As is the world of mobile technologies and in recent times the two are slowly merging in many key areas.

For us, this is a good thing as the clunky old world way of having to code an app in various flavours, then upload it to the various app stores and hope it gets approved, then it needs to be deployed to users.

Now that whole process is, well, slow.

It's slow as every time that a minor change is required you need to go through the whole process and, if another change is needs even a day later, you need to do it all over again.

The whole system is just too cumbersome.

ahead of the pack

At rapport we've been in front of this for some time now using an HTML5 based "app" that is actually a web interface that allows near instantaneous manipulation and customisation, even down to a particular business.

We can tailor it on the fly for your users, we can alter elements, add and remove items and brand the entire experience within the pages to your business through the use of logos and typefaces.

Pretty neat eh?

It means that you and your customers see exactly what you want them to see. Or don't.

All branded how you wish it to be.

We have been deploying rapport in this way since 2015 after giving up on the endless, tireless cycle of trying to develop and update apps then distributing them through the web stores.

user benefits

That's all well and good but how does this affect actual users of our software and crucially, what benefits does it bring to the party?

We already touched on some of them above of course but there is a huge advantage we didn't mention, cost.

Because doing things the way we do negates the need for all that development time, time to submit, review and so on the cost to implement mobile use is lowered to an enormous extent. In turn this means that we can include mobile use in our normal cost packages without piling charges onto our users for all that time and effort.

Yes we know that rapport was already one of the cheapest field service solutions around and we know that we could charge users more for mobile use but we have chosen not to do so. Instead, we chose to build in this valuable feature effectively for free.

You can perhaps now better understand how using the latest mobile web technologies not only delivers rapport users a better, cleaner and more vibrant experience but, it also keeps the costs down significantly.

pulling data

Another big benefit is to be able to "embed" other data sources within the "app" or indeed down to embedding information within a service call.

Currently we do use this to bring in data from the likes of Google but watch out for more incredibly valuable features using this technology in the future.