iSites Brings iPhone Apps to the Masses
There has been lots of discussion about the future of iPhone apps and their importance to businesses. Most of this discussion has been focused on large, Fortune 500-type businesses, and the necessity to keep that brand name in front of the consumer. As with all AppEveryday reviews, we are cautious to jump on a bandwagon, especially when there is a high cost to entry. Most small- to medium-sized businesses cannot afford $10-$75k to produce a custom iPhone app when it could only get in the hands of a small group of people.
That all changed last week when a company called iSites rolled out a product that enables you to produce an iPhone app for only $25. It is a self-service model where you give your app a title, a logo and a theme. Then you share your websites RSS feeds with iSites and they will create custom tabs that pull in information dynamically. Additionally, this app can be made available to Google Android users for just a little bit more, which opens up your mobile market to a large portion of smartphone users. iSites handles all of the technical details with Apple, which is typically half the battle when it comes to developing for this platform.
GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE
As with all apps we supply you with a sample usage case that will hopefully help you generate some ideas of how your business could be using this product.
- Small Grocery Store Chain – This grocer isn’t ready for online grocery shopping or even shopping list synching, but still would like a presence on a mobile device. With iSites you could create a two-tab application with the first tab being a list of your specials that week pulled from your website. The second tab would be a list of recipes that you could pull from any online repository (like Epicurious) that makes their recipes available. It wouldn’t be an exhaustive list of recipes, just enough to help trigger some meal ideas. For just a one-time fee of $25 you would supply timely information to a valuable group of customers, and stay relevant until the mobile market shakes out. A year down the road you may see heavy usage of this app and decide to build a custom one for many thousand dollars. You may also see low usage of this app and be glad you didn’t spend the big money.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This is a well thought-out product with a well thought-out business model that makes sense for all but the largest of businesses today. At AppEveryday we always encourage businesses to get their feet wet on a technology before diving all the way in. This is finally way to do that for the mobile world.
