What are your experiences with Tapatalk? A valuable member of my community has asked if I can put my site on Tapatalk. It's free, it looks easy enough to do. But I have no experience with it. Is it worth the time and hastle? Is it widely used? What else can you tell me about it?
For the Admin, there's no reason why you should not be using this valuable service. It's free and personally, I think any admin who refuses to do it is an idiot. The cost comes into play for the users who spend a pittance for the client on their mobile device. I've provided it for years now, and wouldn't even dream of not providing the option for my users.
+1 for using it on my sites too. Lots of my members have Tapatalk for other forums they use and this just means they can use mine through it too. It's not heavy on server resources, doesn't cost anything to operate, and only needs updating occasionally. Good for you, because it's good for your members.
Tapatalk is widely used, yes I have gotten quite a few unique members on some of my forums which were ones that only used tapatalk to join forums I use it on all my communities when possible
Generally positive. Easy to install, little maintenance required aside form updates. IMHO, it's not something that will draw a lot of traffic or new users to the boards; just a nice service to offer to your users.
It requires to be kept up to date to work. Updates happen a lot more frequently than what you would expect and want from such. Make sure you don't add the code bit to your forum skins (it makes a notice asking people if they want to buy the app). Mobile layouts and layouts that are "responsive" are much more user friendly because they don't require anything.
Tapatalk install and maintenance takes literally 2 minutes to upload and 3 minutes to install. My users love it. It is the best mobile client for Android and iPhone without compare. It's the best few dollars spent on an app, especially considering how much junk is available. People waste money on $4.99 apps that aren't have as great as Tapatalk. My mobile usage has grown significantly as a result. The notifications are awesome.
Do you think it's better than forumrunner? I only ask because I have forumrunner on my phone and I hate it
To be honest, I've yet to try forumrunner. I heard that forum runner has "alerts" which is what made it better, I get alerts from my tapatalk app so maybe they've (TT) has updated their app. I don't know if I'll try FR now that IB owns it
From a user perspective I find tapatalk much better than forumrunner. From an admin perspective they are both horrible. Tapatalk because a massive number of admins has issues with it and therefore they keep releasing new version. Which in turn causes new issues. ForumRunner because its owned by IB and they do not give clarity about their use of user data.
One of my members asked for it too, so I installed the plugin. I have absolutely no idea how it looks and works, but 2-3 of them said they're using it and it's good. If they say it ... I use my tablet with the full templates anyway, so I don't need any mobile apps or themes, but it looks like they're enjoying it.
I've got Tapatalk on all of mine - there's even a tie-in with VigLink now that you can enable in the options to monetise outgoing links.
I have seen issues from time to time with the push servers but members love the app and its a great way to be mobile with little effort.
I have just removed Tapatalk from my big board, because it was showing spammy popups to Google Chrome users telling them to download the chrome notifier from the Google webstore. Tapatalk does not have a setting to disable this, nor have they asked permission to advertise their products/services on my website. Mind that the notifier will bring your website down if you have a lot of users. Its similar to a DoS attack because of the massive number of requests every user makes.
We had all sorts of issues with the last couple of releases of Tapatalk and rolled back to the first release with vbseo's like functionality. We haven't had an issue since but I am concerned about the negative impact their push servers have had with my site. I have a pre push version ready to be installed the second it gives me issues again
