Back in June at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple announced it would aggressively enforce rule 4.2.6 for iOS submissions which bans apps based on templates to live stand-alone on its app store. It is currently purging thousands of apps from the store and will no longer support new submissions of or updates to branded event apps similar to others on the store. The majority of event app vendors sell high priced, stand alone apps based on templates they submit to the store for their clients. That is why Event Managers Blog wrote that Apple’s decision will kill branded event apps as we knew them.
Since our inception in 2011, Yapp has opted for what we call the “Container App Model” where apps you create at http://yapp.us publish instantly inside of Yapp on the iOS and Android app stores. During the last 6 years we looked at our competition – and our inbox of branded app requests – and wondered whether we were leaving lucrative business on the table. While we did create a few white label apps for clients, we became increasing steadfast in our belief that the Container App approach provided a superior benefits to our customers and the overall app ecosystem.
You can see our very early thinking in many of our help articles that talk about how Yapp works, but we thought in light of Apple’s enforcement of this rule we’d like to outline again why the Container App model is great for organizers and attendees:
- Your app is live in minutes. No need to go through the headaches of App Stores approval process. Your app is published inside of Yapp immediately.
- You can push changes instantly. Schedule change, no problem – just publish to let people know.
- You don’t have to worry about maintenance. Yapp handles making sure your app is updated, has all the latest and greatest features of our platform and iOS/Android, and works on all modern handsets. That’s because we updated our Yapp app once and all hundreds of thousands of apps that have been created are updated. If you are the thousandth app developed by your vendor, who knows when they’ll get to updating your app.
- A Container App is much easier to use: Using a container app makes it easy for your attendees to know what to download and where they need to login. They don’t have to be searching through the app store and figure out whether they need to download your corporate app, your internal communication app, your event app, or some other app that has the name of your company. They download Yapp once and then the specific apps meant for them appear inside of the container.
- You save a lot of money: Since we don’t have to submit, maintain, and update a stand alone instance of your app on the app stores, we can offer affordable prices so that events of any size can have an app. Yapp plans start at $399 and come with unlimited installs.
- You can better market your event app to your intended audience: People think that having their own icon on the app store is cool or in some cases necessary for people to find their app. However, with millions of apps on the store, you aren’t getting new users or attendees by having an icon. You are getting confusion and your competitors finding and downloading your app and possibly your sensitive information.
If you have a huge budget and need a totally bespoke experience and will develop an event app from scratch that you will be using year after year. Then the white label model is the way to go, but make sure your app is actually custom.
If on the other hand you want to use your app for your event and need an affordable solution with a very rich set of feature then the container app model is the best way to move forward.
We believe that apps for events and employee communication will continue to grow in prevalence and benefit to attendees, employees, organizers, and management. Maybe we were lucky or maybe we just thought differently, but we are happy the industry is moving to the Container App model Yapp pioneered.
