Conduit's easy app-building platform gets a social refresh and Windows Phone support December 06, 2011
by Martin Bryant
If you want to create a content-based mobile app at low cost, there are a number of options but most are either very expensive or incredibly limited. Conduit sits somewhere between these two extremes and thanks to new features released today, its offering has become even more compelling.
Conduit allows you to create an app containing feeds of content from your site’s RSS feeds, YouTube channel, Facebook Page, Twitter account and more using a simple interface. From today, social media content gets more powerful with the ability for users to interact with it directly from the app. A ‘like’ with an app’s Facebook tab, for example, will translate into a like on the actual Facebook Page the content is pulled from. This makes it easier for publishers to generate social activity without much effort at all from their audiences.
The growth in popularity of SoundCloud as an audio sharing platform is reflected in the introduction of support for the service, allowing you to add playlists and an audio player directly within apps.
One of Conduit’s key strengths is the way apps can be rolled out across multiple platforms such as iOS, Android and BlackBerry, as well as the mobile Web, with ease straight from the app builder itself. From today, Windows Phone 7 support is rolled out, including the ability to customise apps with the unique graphical style used by Microsoft’s mobile operating system. Apps can then be uploaded straight into the Windows Phone Marketplace.
In addition to these changes, the overall design of apps built with Conduit have had a visual refresh, making them better looking and more customisable – something that’s important if you want to make sure that your app doesn’t look like it was built to a template.
The new features are available from today.