evenTwo arrives to the United States and Italy
evenTwo has reached a distribution agreement for creating evenTwo USA, that will exclusively represent and promote the event apps of the Spanish leading company. The operations will be based in Miami (Florida), from where service and support will be provided for the whole country. At the same time, the event software company StudioVisio will be exclusively promoting evenTwo in Italy from their headquarters in Florence. Thanks to this alliance, the Italian company introduces quality native apps in their offer while evenTwo gains a valuable asset with a solid project and an experienced team on-site.
United States is the main market in the MICE sector and evenTwo has already developed apps for events organized there for clients such as SAP, WOBI and The Protein Society. In addition, after the steps taken in Germany, France and Portugal, Italy was one of the main target markets to pursue the expansion through Europe.
Undoubtedly, having team members on the terrain is key to face the strong competition, acquire new clients and provide a better service. With these actions, evenTwo intensifies its presence in the American and European continents and continues with its internationalization, which already accounts for a distribution network present in more than 10 countries.
(Definitive?) changes in Apple’s guidelines
What was going on with Apple?
At the end of August 2017, we published important information on Apple’s new guidelines and how they affected our sector, companies that create customized mobile Apps for events. You can read it here.
New change on Apple’s guidelines from December 20th
On December 20th, Apple published a major update on these new guidelines, lowering the initial level of restrictions they wanted to impose.
In summary, this results in a wider range of options when it comes to publishing Apps for events. From our point of view, the fastest and most efficient option is to publish your event in eventsPlace, a multi-App launched on January 9th that enhances the experience of the event attendees. Also, this change will allow us to continue working with those customers who require an App for a “white label” event by publishing it with their developer account.
The apple policy update and the revolution in the event apps market
What is going on?
In the WWDC 2017 (Apple Developers annual meeting), Apple announced, as a main point, to cut down duplicated and cloned applications.
Although we always carefully follow up the conference, it was not initially related with our market: Bespoke Native Application´s development.
As evenTwo only build bespoke customized mobile applications, that we develop not using commercialized templates or web generators, we were not impact with this new policy.
Recently, Apple has made a last update of the new policy, communicating that Event Apps Developers are no longer allowed no publish more than one unique application, not considering brands, contents or event names. That means for all the event Apps market, to only publish an unique application (Container App) that includes all customer events, and no longer publish one application by customer/event. Please find more detailed information on this link.
Clearly this new policy not only impact on Event Apps but to the App industry itself.
Actually, the 75% percent of Apps published nowadays in the Store, will be affected by this new policy.
Why Apple made this decision
Apple, as one of the biggest corporations, implements their policies according to their own business model.
Essentially, Apple is looking to make as easier as possible the Apps search in the new Apple Store designed for iOS 11, by drastically reducing the search results for the users; Honestly, we understand how difficult is to find one App into the Store lately.
How this impact the Events developers
This new policy full impacts our industry. Although we agree that, to have a unique App hub for all the customers /events applications would be the best option, the Bespoke White Labelling model is highly demanded by customers.
All Bespoke Native Apps builders need to change the model by creating a unique Container App that contains all the customers/events applications.
A few days ago, Apple has started to reject new applications with the current way of working; that means the current model needs to be changed immediately.
What we know up today
Unfortunately, the published information is not completely clear, but we are in direct contact with them and have spoken to Apple several times:
- Apple is requesting to all of us to create a new unique App that contains all customers/events.
- This new policy impacts all industries not only the Events one.
- Apple is currently rejecting applications that do not compliance with this new policy and is not clear when is going to be completely impossible to publish new Apps in the Store.
- Although is no available information about when the already published Apps are going, we guess is going to take time.
- Companies with Enterprise accounts, are going to be able to continue publishing Apps using these accounts.
What to do I am willing to create an App for my Event
We can continue building new Apps; contact with us if you are willing to create an App for your Event.
What is coming up
This is a positive challenge for all of us: Event developers and organizations. We are going to maintain the Apps functionalities and improve the processes and timeframes to build an App.
Following this new policy, we are going to create a more sustainable and scalable way of working in the long term.
In contrast with our competitors, we were already researching the Container App model and we are already building a unique Marketplace for Event Apps that is called to be a new revolution in the industry, by drastically reducing the delivery times and creating a new high quality standard in the Industry.
We are living challenging times with this new policy, and we are enjoying being part of this changing and innovation moments.
How to use push notifications in your event’s App
What would you think if you could send instant messaging to all attendees at your event?, and what if you could do it before, during and after the event?
Push notifications allow event organizers to send messages to attendees who have installed event’s app on their devices. We always talk about native applications because notifications are sent through Markets, Apple App Store and Google Play.
Any event professional can imagine countless uses to this feature, before, during and after the event.
With evenTwo we have had enough experience and next we can present some ideas of how to use push notifications:
Before the event:
Reminders.- For example the time and event’s place, asking attendees to sign up with the App…
Announcements.- Last minute changes.
During the event:
Changes in rooms, delays…, any information that may be helpful to attendees.
Promotions, contests, polls, surveys…, information that improves interaction with attendees.
After the event:
Satisfaction survey notification.
Upcoming events.
New documentation available on the App…
As you see there are many possibilities to use push notifications but our experience gives us two simple tips:
No abuse of notifications.
Try the information will always be helpful or interesting to attendees.
Any comments are welcome, at this time we realized that who better knows his attendees is event organizer and is who can best handle this feature. How would you use push notifications in your event mobile App?