I was thinking about making an app for my motorcycle club, a simple one that just has the list of chapters, and an upcoming rides/event list so we can keep better organized on where and when we will be riding, like a calendar of events.
I did a google search and found one site that let you build your own app from a template but looks confusing and controlling.
Anyone here have any experience or recommendations on app building software? Just throwing it out there. thx.
Couldn’t you just use a calendar service like google to do that? Or a shared spreadsheet?
I ask because building and maintaining a smartphone app yourself is a complicated task. You’d probably want to support both iOS and Android, you need to share state between all users which requires backend services and distribution of the app alone is going to be a pain.
If you were to use google spreadsheets, you wouldn’t need to distribute an app to all the members, there’s good preexisting apps to interact with that service.
@sobek hit the nail on the head. Making a “standalone” app is a lot of hassle. The easiest way to do it is to leverage existing services.
You can probably do anything you need with spreadsheets and calendars. Spreadsheets contain programming instructions so you could build a complicated app in spreadsheets. But if you want to automate stuff like sending notifications or you want a bot, then it does make sense to do a bit of scripting.
Again leveraging existing services, you’d be best off building a bot to interact with a platform that has good support and widely used apps, such as Discord or Telegram. You could write the bot in a common programming language, such as Python, and run it on a machine that is always on at your home, such as a Raspberry, or on a free VM for a year at Amazon Web Services.
Or better, e-mail! It’s called SMTP on the programming side and all you need is to create a Gmail account for the bot with no 2FA and a vanilla Python install.
If this sounds complicated, just stick to spreadsheets and calendars. Making your own mobile app is a lot more complicated than what I describe here.
So in order of complexity, your options are:
I’ve tried that… google calendar and others… these members are older and less tech. Few ever used it. I guess it’s just group text for now. (And they complain about that because they don’t know how to silence it and complain about the constant beeps and interruptions. lol
Too old for e-mail?
If they want an app, make a Telegram bot.
There’s a lot of apps for organizing groups of people already.
I found most are too specialized in their features, e.g. they depict hierarchy in great length, or financials or football club rosters.
For our 13 people music club we chose Klubraum. It’s simple and can do what we need, maybe even a bit more. Which is organizing rehearsals and concerts without sending 1000 Whatsapp messages.
At the end of each rehearsal we sit together, eat Brezels and drink Beer, talk about when the next one will be. Then I clone the current appointment to a new date. Takes only seconds, after which all phones in the room go off and everybody can press a Yes/No button for attendance. So we always know who will be missing. Attendance can be amended later, also on short notice. It’s kinda important to know if the only Tubist or Drummer will show up.
It can sync events into your phone calendar, but the implementation is not very good. It struggles with shared calendars. They know and are working on improving it. Also I don’t like the design, they used a portable UI lib and it does not look native to an iPhone. But: It’s free.
Check what’s there! Building and maintaining an app is work counted in man years and millions of dollares. There might just be the perfect one for your use case.
Edit: Just adding that the majority of members is 60+, with one member sticking to a paper calendar. Still works for us.
I pushed this app forward since we had the same complaints about too much chitchat beep boop all day. And everybody (but one) was feeding it into a phone calendar anyway.
I think the app Spond would fit your needs, @Magnum50?
You can set up your own group and manage activities, email and texts.
Thanks Pony and Troll… for actually answering the question. Will check it out.