Faithlab’s approach to church mobile apps is:
- Apps should be simple. Think about it — good apps do one thing well. Church apps often try to provide the full website experience, and all features. But we believe a focused app is more useful for users.
- Most users want quick interactions with a church app. They want to answer these questions: what’s going on, when are events, etc. That’s why our apps are focused on delivering news and notifications. If a user is out and about and wonders about an upcoming event, the app should make that fast and easy.
- A church app should: Provide notifications (assuming the user gives permission), news, with optional features such as daily devotionals, and the latest sermon videos.
- A church app should automatically pull news and video content from the church website, so one posting loads content to both website and app.
The app will be provided for Android and iOS (iPhone) through their respective app stores. Updates will be pushed out as needed via those app stores.
Most apps are very expensive to produce, but Faithlab’s approach saves money by using a special system that uses your WordPress site to handle much of the backend content delivery functionality. This also means that when a news post or sermon is added to your website, it is automatically pushed to the web app and formatted for that screen.
Notifications (the red dot on the app icon, as well as on-screen notifications) are also possible. The church would have control over what and when notifications are pushed to the app.
Sample
To see a sample of this, search for and download the free FBCLaurens app to a mobile device. You will see that it offers a splash screen with the church logo, then a landing screen with key options. A slide-out menu offers the same and additional options.
(Note, due to iTunes App Store rules, the “giving” option only functions from the slide-out menu – and loads the giving page in the browser. If the give function was completely in the app, Apple would take 30% of each transaction. There is no such limit in the Android version. Nonetheless, giving on the iOS app does work just fine – and this approach avoids the fee).