Bringing Manifestly to Mobile

Leveraging the Ionic Framework

A key part of our overall strategy is to bring Manifestly to the places people already work. This is why our Slack Integration has been a major success, as many of our customers use Slack every day.

People also do their work on the go. Whether a property manager needs to review an apartment before renting it, or a landscaping company is conducting a weekly walkthrough, they are mobile.

Manifestly needed to be mobile, too. As a bootstrapped startup with limited resources, we couldn’t afford to hire an iOS Developer and an Android Developer, and then wait an additional 6 months to see our app in the respective stores.

Enter Ionic.

With Ionic, we were able to go from zero to 60 in just over a month! Let me say that again… From the time we started developing with Ionic to the time our app was published in both the Android and Apple App store was just 6 weeks. (Not to mention a third of that was just waiting for Apple!)

The Ionic Framework pulled through and gave us a tremendous strategic advantage in the marketplace. To this day, we’re still the only team based checklist service with native mobile apps thanks to Ionic!

Getting Started

Josh Morony’s book was incredibly useful for getting started. We saved many hours by having access to this knowledge.

Josh provides step-by-step instructions for building and releasing an Ionic app for both the Google Play Store as well as the Apple App Store. That was worth the price alone. Thanks, Josh!

Ionic View & Ionic Serve

The Ionic framework provides several different options for developing and debugging apps. The easiest option is locally in a web browser. Simply fire up Ionic Serve, test your app in Chrome, tweak your front-end code, see results immediately in the browser. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

Sometimes, however, it helps to see how your app will function on a real device. Thanks to Ionic View, you can fire up your app on a local device without the bottleneck of releasing into the App stores.

Once you’re published in the Apple App store, Apple’s Test Flight makes it easy to preview your next release. However, we haven’t mastered how to view Beta releases in the Android store on a real device, yet.

Say Cheese!

For many of our customers, adding photos to their tasks is important. This additional level of detail can be very powerful and even be built in as an input to a checklist step. Ionic Native allows developers to easily leverage native device capabilities, such as the camera.

Manifestly & Ionic in 2017

There is always plenty of work to do, but we listen to what our customers want first. They have prioritized the following for us in 2017, which we will build and deliver using Ionic:

• Push Notifications
• Signature Collection
• Basic Checklist Creation

Stay up to date with all of our updates on our Latest Features and hit that little ❤ button below if you’d like to help spread the word of Manifestly — we’d really appreciate it!