What community teams ask before they launch an app
An app for your members, without rebuilding the community
Most community teams already want an app. The problem is launching one without rebuilding the platform your team has spent years configuring and moderating.
Push reaches members that email and social do not
Email open rates have fallen for years, and the promotions folder takes a cut of what does get delivered. On social, the platform decides how many of your members see a post, and it changes that number without telling you. Both channels stand between you and people who already asked to hear from you.
An app puts you back in direct contact. Your community gets an icon on the member's home screen and a session that stays signed in. A reply reaches the member waiting for it. An event reminder arrives the morning of the event. A renewal prompt goes to the member whose membership lapses this week.
Simple Flying app users read 94 articles a month. Their web visitors read about two. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society, a UK professional body whose members sign in to a member portal, publishes The Pharmaceutical Journal through an app we built the same way.
Building natively means keeping two communities in step
Custom native means recreating profiles, feeds, threads, replies, notifications, groups, badges and every permission rule in Swift, Kotlin or React Native. After that you keep the two versions matching. Every moderation change and every new group type ships twice.
A native app also shows only what your platform hands it through an API. Custom fields, moderation states, badge logic and group permissions each need rebuilding before a member sees them.
In-house that costs $500K-$1M+ a year, and agencies quote the same. You end up maintaining a second copy of your community, written in a language your team does not use.
How the app gets built, and who looks after it
Your community site powers every screen. We add what a native app needs on top: push notifications to the lock screen, deep links that open a specific thread, sessions that stay signed in, and native navigation between areas of the community.
Discourse, BuddyBoss, Circle, Vanilla, Mighty Networks, phpBB, a membership plugin, or a platform your team built. Every plugin, theme, single sign-on flow, moderation queue, private group and paid tier works in the app the way it works on the web. It is the same site serving both, so there is no second set of permission rules to keep aligned.
We build the apps, QA them, and submit them under your developer accounts. We handle OS updates, certificate renewals, the SDK rebuild deadlines each quarter, and store policy.
Getting members to install
We do the launch with you. Install prompts on the community site, smart banners on mobile web, an announcement to your members, and QR codes at events. Members need a reason to install now, and we help you pick one.
Push then brings them back. Replies and mentions bring individuals in. Announcements and event reminders bring everyone. On Enterprise, your customer success manager reviews app metrics with you monthly, and included development time covers app-side changes and support for your own developers.
We have published 2,000+ apps since 2013, for communities, membership organisations and publishers. We build a working preview from your live site, and you install it on your own phone.