There are two issues that come up over and over again when we talk to prospective clients: “if I’ve bought the application, why should I keep paying for yearly maintenance” and “We’re thinking of just developing this ourselves”.

These two issues are related.

iPhone applications should not be an exercise in box ticking — iPhone app, check, next…. A useful iPhone application comes with a set of expectations from the user about the way it feels, the way looks, the way it reacts to way the user interacts with it. A failure to respect this leads to the fate of about ⅔rds of iPhone applications: they never get opened more than once or twice. For your destination this is a disaster – you’re supplying the best information possible on behalf of your members and your visitors are not even bothering to look at what you have to say.

There’s a reason you don’t photocopy your destination brochures, even though it has exactly the same information that your expensive glossy stock paper version has – it just doesn’t feel right.

Or to put it another way, you want an iPhone application that people look forward to using again and again.

Now, there’s two non-Discover Anywhere Mobile solutions for getting a custom iPhone application built: cheap or professional. Cheap is going to give you the photocopied brochure: it has the correct information but there’s no appeal. If data is being pulled from a website live (the easy approach, often taken for quick and dirty iPhone applications to solve the ‘keep-the-app-up-to-date problem’) your visitor is going to experience a delay getting to what they want to see. As Google has extensively studied in the past and has nearly perfected solving, even the tiniest delays ruin the user experience. You now have shelfware. Professional will give you the solution you’re looking for, given time and money. There’s some great looking iPhone apps out there in the tourism / leisure categories. Some of them cost 6 figures to develop, almost all the others a reasonably sized fraction of that. Why? Because great work – great graphics, a feel for the user’s needs, well-tested applications – requires talented staff at all levels of the development agency.

Discover Anywhere Mobile has the solution for your destination. We’ve done all the hard work for you: we offer great looking interfaces that visitors will want to come back to again and again; we customize the interface for your destination’s branding and message, so visitors don’t feel like their getting a generic product; and – behind the scenes – we keep your visitor’s iPhone updated with your latest information to give them the immediacy they’re looking for while actually using the app.

And we’ve figured out how to do all of this at a price point that, quite frankly, is well below what anyone should be quoting for custom development, even for the “cheap route”.

And this brings us to the issue of ongoing maintenance. Nothing, not websites, not software, not mobile applications are “fire and forget”. Issues of bugs aside (which will always requiring fixing) no application remains fresh. Great websites are redeveloped every few years as our understanding of how people interact with the web evolves – every website is effectively amortized over the period you have it for.

Maintenance, for Discover Anywhere Mobile apps, covers several things. It covers the ongoing costs of getting your data, reorganizing your data for best presentation on the mobile web, and pushing out that data to all of your visitors for that great destination experience through an iPhone app. It covers access to all of our other features and apps for other devices that Discover Anywhere Mobile has and will make – yes, these will cost extra money but only a marginal incremental cost. The iPhone didn’t exist 3 years ago; the capabilities to do Augmented Reality weren’t there 6 months ago. Apps _always_ needed to be updated in the mobile world or, once again, you’re shipping shelfware.

In short, Discover Anywhere Mobile wants to be your partner in making sure your apps deliver the best possible destination experience for all of your visitors. Our solution provides the best of both worlds – low cost, with professional polish.