Mobile App?

[Magus]

Greetings

My friend is a minister of a large church. He is young and likes to keep his church abreast of new technology trends. He has issued a query among those that know him to ask if anyone might suggest how to go about developing an app for Smart Phone devices.

Specifically, his query was this:
we’re planning to develop an iPhone/Android app for the church - any recommendations out there for companies to use?

And I replied to him with this:
What exactly would the app do?

And his reply was thus:
Rick, it would allow people to access primarily our sermon media - audio for now, though video might come later. We would also want it to push blogs, and even updates, i.e. weather issues, cancellations, etc.

And I asked the following:
Sorry for the questions but I have one more for clarification purposes. Are you wanting the app to be "real time" as in you want folks to have an ability to listen to a live stream? Or would this be simply an app that would facilitate access to archival material?

And the last reply was:
archived material only. Nothing live, at this point.

My last reply was this:
Seems that a well formatted web page that displayed nicely on a Smart Phone would do the trick, no? I’m struggling to figure out why an app would be needed.

And his last reply was this:
Rick, it could work, though access to the iPhone app store and/or Android Market would be much preferred. For one, it would not fit perfectly on each device, if we don’t have an app built. And secondly, having them in the app stores would facilitate much greater distribution.

So bouncing things off this knowledgeable and friendly group to draw on your collective wisdom.

Cheers... Rick

[sadlerjon]

I was looking into this sort of thing and found two companies that were developing apps specifically for churches. The better looking one (IMHO) was Right Brain Media. Their app is called "WiFi Ministry" - product page is here: http://www.rightbrainmedia.com/tabid/2362/Default.aspx

I haven't talked with them yet as I'm also considering doing a cross platform development myself using Adobe AIR.

[JoshGuerette]

A lot of the church apps I've seen are there simply to have something that's easy to find, will always be in the same place (ie. home screen), and is easy to use. Although a properly formatted mobile site can do some of the same things, it's a pain for people to type in an address even the first time (much less again & again). Plus the iOS and Android UI make it easy to create something that looks better than a bulleted list, and navigation is better as well.

But, it comes down to the price for a lot of churches: Do they have someone who can code it, or do they have the funds to pay for someone to code it? A mobile site is basically free (or extremely low cost).

[ccvid]

I recently ran into a company that will turn your website into an app for android users. It's free too (don't worry...you don't have to put on their adverts unless you want to make money from the app). It's called appgeyser.

We had a mobile version of our website... so we used appgeyser and made our mobile website into an app! It worked great.

You can then publish your app on appgeyser and on your website. For $25 you can publish it in the Android marketplace. We went with the Android marketplace and then I've been promoting it on our website and on facebook with links to the android marketplace.

Our next step is to get an app on Iphones and Ipads, but we need to change the website first to make it apple compatible (We need to switch from flash to html5). PhoneGap may help us create the app for iPhones!