Yesterday, we announced the new FixMyStreet apps (download here for Apple devices and here for Android).

In this post, we want to explain a bit more about why we spent time and effort on making them, when normally we advocate for mobile websites.

Plus, for our technical audience, we’ll explain some of the tools we used in the build.

The why bit

When we redesigned FixMyStreet last year, one of the goals was to provide a first class experience for people using the website on their mobile phone browsers. We’re pretty happy with the result.

We’re also believers in only building an app if it offers you something a mobile website can’t. There are lots of reasons for that: for a start, apps have to be installed, adding a hurdle at which people may just give up. They’re time-consuming to build, and you probably can’t cater for every type of phone out there.

Given that, why did we spend time on making a mobile app? Well, firstly, potholes aren’t always in places with a good mobile signal, so we wanted to provide a way to start reporting problems offline and then complete them later.

Secondly, when you’re on the move you often get interrupted, so you might well start reporting a problem and then become distracted. When that happens, reports in browsers may get lost, so we wanted an app that would save it as you went along, and allow you to come back to it later.

And the how bit (with added technical details, for the interested)

Having decided to build an app the next question is how to build it. The main decision is whether to use the native tools for each phone operating system, or to use one of the various toolkits that allow you to re-use code across multiple operating systems.

We quickly decided on using Phonegap, a cross platform toolkit, for several reasons: we’d already used Phonegap successfully in the past to build an app for Channel 4’s Great British Property Scandal (that won an award, so clearly something went right) and for Züri Wie Neu in Zurich, so it was an easy decision to use it again.

It’s a good fit for a small team like ours, because as well as reducing the amount of code we have to write it also makes use of the skills we already have in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. We could even re-use parts of the JavaScript from the main FixMyStreet site. There are compromises in using this sort of toolkit, but for our circumstances we think they’re the right ones to make.

We decided to focus on apps for Android and iOS, as these are the two most popular operating systems. Even with this limitation, there is a lot of variety in the size and capability of devices that could be running the app – think iPads and tablets – but we decided to focus primarily on providing a good experience for people using phone-sized devices. This decision was partly informed by the resources we have at hand, but the main decider was that we mostly expect the app to be used on phones.

Phonegap gives you the means to run a JavaScript app on the phone, but it doesn’t provide much else. We used JQuery mobile to handle the UI and Backbone.js for the structure. This worked out reasonably well for us but given the pace of development in JavaScript frameworks at the moment we’ll probably look to see what’s available for any future app projects.

There was one big challenge: the functionality that allows you to take photos  in-app. We just couldn’t get it to work with older versions of Android  – and it’s still not really adequate. We just hope most people are updating their operating systems! Later versions of Android (and iOS) were considerably less frustrating, and perhaps an earlier decision to focus on these first would have led to a shorter development process.

So, there you have it. The app does what we wanted it to (on the majority of systems), and you can download it right now (Android users go here; iOS here).

On balance though? We’d still advocate a mobile-optimised browser site almost every time. But sometimes circumstances dictate – like they did for FixMyStreet – that you really need an app.

We’d give you the same advice, too, if you asked us. And we’d happily build you an app, or a mobile-friendly site, whichever was more suitable.

Photos by Tup Wanders and Nicholas A Tonelli (CC)