When I came to know about a website that makes it easier for users to develop their own Android and iOS apps, I decided to give it a try. This website is instappy.com. Before I share my experience about instappy, let me first tell you what it is.
Instappy is a cloud based platform that helps users in developing native apps for Android and iOS operating systems.
It helps users in creating apps with fully functional built-in CMS, over 46 Rich media and social API's, data backup, secure cloud hosting, several utility features, Built-in system for offers and deals, Push notifications and several other features. Instappy also providesfully Google indexed app, free payment gateway, inventory management.
Being cloud based, it does not require the user to download any software. To use it, all you need is to create an account on it. Instappy offers several price packages with various features. There's also a free option but that only gives a 30-day trial period. If you want to develop your app and keep it for longer, you have to pay. Also, as far as I could understand, the payment is not for per account basis. You will need to pay for every app you develop. The price packages differ for different kind of apps. That is Content Publishing Apps, Retail and Catalogue Apps and Enterprise Apps have different packages. Some packages show ads on the apps but users have the choice to upgrade to remove the ads.
Also, instappy just helps users in developing the apps. If you want them on Google Play Store or iTunes etc. you will need to follow the policies of these stores and pay their fee as usual.
Once you choose your package, you can start creating your app. Creating an app on Instappy requires no coding or scripting language. It is basically just drag and drop kind of process. For example, I tried creating an app featuring me as an author. I just selected the template I wanted. Next, I selected the cards (image and video, for example) and dropped them in the preview pane. One by one, I clicked on those cards and uploaded my own images in their places.
Instappy allows users to create apps with several pages and even tabbed pages. Instappy also allows easy customization to apps like selecting the background, the top bar colour and the fonts and their size and colours. The apps can be created in 20 languages and the instappy website also makes available an easy way to view statistics related to your apps.
Another thing that I like was I could also drag and drop the useful icons like those of Facebook, Twitter etc to make it easier for the users to share my content.
However, despite the process being very easy and simple to understand, I failed to complete the creation of my app. That is because of the problems in uploading images. Now, the images I was uploading had already been optimized for my blog. So the size of images was not the problem. The first image uploaded within a minute. But the second image, the cover of my novel Lemon Girl, took almost an hour and several tries before it successfully uploaded. I then tried to upload the image of my first novel Dream's Sake. But again it made me wait for long and after several tries, I finally gave up. Here I'd also like to add that both my laptop and broadband have decent enough speeds. Still, the images just refused to load.
It might just be a problem faced by me. It might be limited to free trial accounts also. The process might go on smoothly for others using paid packages. But since I couldn't upload even the covers of my novels, I decided to try out the next steps even with my incomplete app. After customizing the colours and adding cards etc. I went to the my apps tab and changed my newly created app from Draft to Publish. That showed up options to help me launch my app. Those were paid packages, of course. I didn't see anyway in which I could just like take my app out and publish it by myself on Google Play etc.
As a final word, I can only say that the idea is great and would definitely prove useful for many. But the free package gives only one month trial and the paid package would only interest professionals as, although Instappy offers comparatively cheaper and more convenient way to develop apps, it is still very expensive. Someone like a hobby blogger would find Instappy too expensive. Also, at least in my personal experience, the website and the app creation process felt too slow.
