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Is There an Interest with Mobile VA Apps?


Drcodyjones

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I'm starting to do mobile application development(Android, Iphone, Ipad) and was wondering if there would be any interest in customized VA chart apps, customized VA route apps, and maybe some customized VA mobile IRC-type chats.

The apps would have the VA colors and logo on it, a customized icon, and pretty much anything else you wanted.

The apps would probably sell for about 15$ for a single airline, all including Android, iPhone, and iPad versions.

Let me know what you guys think

Cody

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I am interested in customized admin center of phpvms. I do not think that there is any virtual pilot who is going to visit my va by his mobile phone because he is going to visit my website when he want to fly!

Have you ever tried to validate pireps via the admin panel? It takes ages to me...

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I always wanted a app for phpVMS for a while.

Due to cellar limits, I have a very limited data usage. I dont want to go to phpVMS admin and load too much data. I wanted an app, that it won't use too much data and that way I don't have to use my PC to do administrating my VA.

Cody, I would be honest, if you ever get that out of the door, I guarantee you would be popular with that app!

Best of luck developing! :D

Cheers!

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I would totally develop one as I worked on the app for my company so I know a fair bit, but I don't really see how I can justify $99/year for iTunes store submission just yet xD

Good luck, if you need any help let me know.

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Huh? Haha. Apples developer program has always been $99/year :blink:

It kinda sucks that they don't offer it for free to people distributing free apps :/

lol, I agree here

Its the same price if you want to develop apps for windows phone. Except its not yearly, its a once off payment of $99. Its still way too much though :blink:

Wow, no wonder why... since I know Andriod is free and mostly open source, I think.

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I love Android 10x more than I like Apple phones. Open source, easy to mod(I put CM7 on mine), plus a load of other neat things.

When I get the app off the ground, I'll host the files on my own site, and, unfortunately, you'll have to install them manually. It's not that hard on Android, but I don't know about Apple products.

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Consider that they're trying to price out the newbies who distribute crappy applications with poor coding. Remember that they pay engineers to review the code behind every app, that is why iOS is such a stable platform to the end user. Also consider that there is a lot of profit per year if you get some popularity, solely by incorporating the iAd network in your free app.

One of the ways around the fees is to develop a mobile version of the website, instead of an actual app. Most smart phones let you "install" any webpage onto the home screen, so it looks and feels like an app, it just doesn't have the benefits of one-time downloading of all images, etc. so the website should be very well optimized to be as efficient as possible on people's bandwidth.

Another option is that you use a third party to distribute your app. There are free and paid services that do this.

Finally, a legitimate way to distribute an app outside the App store is through "Ad Hoc distribution," where you allow the end user to download a zip, or .ipa file and they install it to their iOS via iTunes. This is for up to 100 users, so if you're creating an app for each virtual airline, I believe this would work just fine as it would be a separate app for each airline.

An app for the admin panel sounds great by the way.

Sources:

http://www.innerfence.com/howto/install-iphone-application-ad-hoc-distribution

https://developer.apple.com/support/ios/iad-network.html

https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/distribute.html

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Kyle, out of curiosity, how much date/month does your service provider allow you?

I have a 2gb/month plan and that's more than enough for Reddit, Teamspeak, a few short Youtube videos, Facebook, Email, and any other websites I need to use, including my VA website. I usually use about 1gb per month.

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Okay guys, I need your opinions:

Do you want an app that pops up a notification saying "A new application has been submitted for YourVA" or "A new PIREP has been submitted to YourVA" after which you can go to a menu that displays all the information about the pilot or PIREP with an accept/deny/add comment button?

OR...

Do you want a full customized mobile admin panel?

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Kyle, out of curiosity, how much date/month does your service provider allow you?

I have a 2gb/month plan and that's more than enough for Reddit, Teamspeak, a few short Youtube videos, Facebook, Email, and any other websites I need to use, including my VA website. I usually use about 1gb per month.

I used to be at 500MB, but my provider was having a deal, so I went up to 1GB/month. But I know, I'm mostly away from computers, and I just don't wanted to burn up my data because when you go on the full site, you'll be loading more data than an app.

Okay guys, I need your opinions:

Do you want an app that pops up a notification saying "A new application has been submitted for YourVA" or "A new PIREP has been submitted to YourVA" after which you can go to a menu that displays all the information about the pilot or PIREP with an accept/deny/add comment button?

OR...

Do you want a full customized mobile admin panel?

I like the idea of that, but there should be an option to enable or disable notifications.

the OR...

Well, It's your call. I would purchase for it, but whatever you are planning is that I would buy customized for my VA if my staff has an smart phone such as Android or iPhone/iPad.

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Finally, a legitimate way to distribute an app outside the App store is through "Ad Hoc distribution," where you allow the end user to download a zip, or .ipa file and they install it to their iOS via iTunes. This is for up to 100 users, so if you're creating an app for each virtual airline, I believe this would work just fine as it would be a separate app for each airline.

Still requires joining the $99/year developer program.

Additionally, you can't produce certificates and provisioning profiles required in order to install your app on iOS without access to their online control panels.

If there was a free way to distribute iOS apps I would be doing it already :)

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