India Broadband Forum has dumped Tapatalk for good

I have been wanting to do this for a long time and the company finally managed to cross the limit of acceptable nuisance enabling me to remove them from the forum completely.

Tapatalk has never been a smooth experience. But it is kind of an only platform around to easily offer a mobile app experience to your visitors without getting a dedicated app developed.

I have been reading about a competitive platform emerging for a long time now but nothing really has arrived on the scene in a long time. I can only imagine that Tapatalk realizes that and they are now misusing their position in the market to making lives horrible for the forum owners.

Sure, most of the bullshit that has been turned on could be disabled by paying them a monthly charge for a pro plan. But personally, I cannot get myself to pay them USD 10 for a mediocre app experience just to remove the spam signature from user posts.

Signature spam was annoying but I got myself to live with it. Ping the user who has it enable once and it is usually taken care of on that account. The setting of course is not saved with the user’s account as all fresh installs (and resets) would turn the signature back on.

Anyhow…

Few days ago, I was using Tapatalk to access the forum and I found a thread that I decided was worth sharing on Twitter. I opened the sidebar menu and picked the share URL option. I selected Twitter and noticed something new…

Tapatalk has added their redirection service to all shares from inside the app. Which means that the link shared on Twitter/Facebook etc. does not start with your domain name but instead is redirected through tapatalk.com domain.

One of the problem with this behavior is that if the link is not parsed properly, the site does not even appear in the embedded preview!

This would not have been a big deal if Tapatalk was not adding their own full screen interstitial ad on these links informing the visitor of the existence of their mobile app that can be used to access that story.

Your browser would load this when you click on a Tapatalk Share URL.

The company defended the move by claiming that every social platform does it. They do. But none of them put on a full screen ad in your face on clicking a link on their platform!

This is in addition to a similar redirection that takes place when you click an external link on your forum from within their app through their domain. This redirects adds on as much as 5–6 seconds to the load time of the link.

Now that Tapatalk has been removed for a couple of days now, I have managed to live without it. I use Chrome to access the forum. XenForo is not exactly a modern mobile web app but at least there is a responsive design which lets me moderate and participate with some hassle.

I would have loved to have some offline support along with background notifications. Maybe we would get it when XenForo reaches version 2. But right now, it’s pretty much a manual affair. It is kind of nice as I do not get pinged on every subscription update like it did with Tapatalk plus I realized how bad the mobile experience is on the forum… The entire exercise is giving me some motivation to look for ways to improve the experience on the mobile web browser.

I hope to see AMP support through a plugin (or natively) on XenForo in the coming months… Hopefully there would be a way to force load the AMP version on mobile browsers as the default user interface. That alone should boost the usability of the mobile website significantly.

Until then… We all suffer.