Yapp - Free Editor

You may have heard of Yapp back in 2012 or 2013 when it was featured on practically every magazine and morning news show in the US. Yapp is website that allows anyone to create their own event app and upload it into their mobile devices. In interviews, Yapp co-founders Maria Seidman and Luke Melia have been quoted in saying that they hope to democratize the mobile app industry by making it possible for everyone to make their own app, even people without any coding experience. When they first demoed Yapp at the 2012 New York Tech Meetup, they focused mainly in creating event apps, but they also announced that they had plans to expand their services and provide more features to enable users to build a greater variety of apps.

Fast forward a few years later—let’s see if Yapp has risen to the challenge and how they measure up to other DIY app builders.

Building Your Yapp App

Creating your Yapp App is pretty straightforward. You visit their website and sign-up for a 14 day free trial or subscribe to their paid services. With the 14 day trial, you can build you own app but you won’t be able to distribute or use it once the trial period expires.

Once you’re logged in, you’re taken to the editor where you can start ‘building’ your app.

As you can see, everything is pretty straightforward and intuitive. There literally isn’t any coding involved. Populating your app with content would literally take more time than building the app itself. And even that doesn’t take much time because you can only upload documents and images.

But with regards to design options, there really isn’t much there. You either upload your own images or settle for a solid background in the color of your choice. You can set the general design layout to be light or dark, and set font colors. Premium packages do offer design templates and custom typography but customization options for these templates are limited at best.

Once you have your cover design, you can include features into your app in the form of ‘pages’. These pages are template features where you can customize the label and content. Invitation, schedule, newsfeed and crowd pics comes with the basic app but you can delete them or include as many pages you want.

In addition to the 4 basic pages, there are 16 other pages that you can include within the app.

When you click on a page you want to add, the left column shows you the basic features, how to use it, and how content would be uploaded within the page (admin or user generated). The labels for the pages and order of the pages can be changed but not the design. And since Yapp was introduced in 2012, they have introduced more features that have made their event apps beefier like Eventbrite integration, videos, document download, and polls. Yapp also made their schedule page more interactive by allowing users to remove event schedules they don’t want included in their itinerary.

Once you’re done adding the pages you want, just click publish and it’ll generate a link that you can send out to anyone who wants to download your app.

But downloading the app isn’t as straightforward as building the app itself. Users first have to go Google Play or iTunes to download Yapp Box, which is a market for all the apps created using Yapp. To download the app you want, just search for it or use the link to download it directly. So integrating this app with a market payment system isn’t an option.

Compared to other builders like BuzzTouch or TheAppBuilder, Yapp doesn’t really give you a lot of room in terms of customization. When you build with Yapp, your event app would look a lot like every other app built with Yapp. But what you give up in terms of design versatility Yapp makes up for in useful and reliable functions. If you regularly host events, forums and conventions, the available features will address most user needs for an event app and the performance has been pretty reliable.

Conclusion

You can’t really say that Yapp has dramatically democratized the mobile app industry as they intended. Yes, there is a demand for simple event apps. Yes, it is nice that their user interface is so simple, you and anyone’s grandma can create a robust event management app if they chose to do so. The simplicity, native look and feel, and competitive pricing does make it an attractive option for anyone who wants to create a basic mobile app.

But as users become more sophisticated, so do their demands. Yapp does have enough event app features to satisfy most users, for now. But Yapp didn’t really grow that much in providing more features or design options to enable users to build beyond event apps. And it could introduce non-traditional features like gamification, forums, features, ecommerce page, or speaker reviews—features that events can use and make the event even better.

Maybe in a way that’s good because the features included do perform well and it still makes Yapp a seriously good option as an event app builder. Having only 20 options plus a simple analytics feature makes things easier for everyday users. But if you know what other apps are capable off, the options available can make you feel like you’re missing out.

Is Yepp a great product? If you’re not a developer, yes it is. Is this something businesses and organizations should use? Probably, if you have very simple needs. But if you’re a developer looking to save time, you’re going to find Yapp extremely limiting. If you’re a company or organization that wants to get more out of each event you hold, then Yapp wouldn’t be enough. And if you’re a developer thinking of using Yapp to save time on development and make a quick buck out of the market, don’t even think about it. If you want to build more than just event apps, or you want to customize the user interface or introduce responsive design, you’d be better off coding things from scratch.