Shall we create a crowd funding campaign for a Loomio app?

Sounds like a perfect thing to raise a proposal over, as I'd love to hear other's opinions on it.

I am, at the moment, of the opinion that supporting a native app is one of the worst decisions our organisation could make at this time. Loomio, in the grand scheme of things, is not a mature app. In terms of performance, in terms of feature richness, in terms of UX, in terms of interoperability and ecosystem connectedness, we still have much to do. (I say this with complete love for the amazing humans that are working on the thing, but it is the truth.) Adding another ball in the air is, in my opinion, going to significantly weaken all of the Loomio experiences, and double (treble if you're asking for app for iPhone and Android... which people will) our development & support cost, and slow the forward momentum of new feature development significantly. At this point in our company's development, getting the product to the point where it is a joy to use has to be the primary priority; there's no other way for us to survive.

We can make a web app that is fast and reliable (we are working so hard on it :D). There are even some newer options bubbling around for web app push notifications. (Push API comes to mind: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notifications-on-the-open-web)

My other thought is that it's not a question of money in my head. Apps aren't just made out of cash; once we had some resources, we need to do recruitment, which in and of itself is exceptionally costly and risky. Maybe we could attract some great talent and get another team working on the thing that's reliable and amazing and fantastic to work with... but maybe not, and it doesn't strike me that a mercenary approach to the thing would work too well (are we going to pay them more than everyone else? What happens if / when the contract is up, the money's gone, and there's no app?)

So to me it's more a question of energy; is there someone or a team of highly skilled technical talent out there willing to do some work towards this and support the thing even as Loomio 1.0 is changing rapidly? It will have to be a person with really highly sought after skills who shares your strong desire for an app experience and is exceptionally generous with his/her valuable time. Seems like a really tough find, although I'm more than open to it being possible, and I'm happy to support that person / group of people with some time and resources if they exist... but not at the cost of our main product, which really needs all the love we can give it.

Our organization has left Loomio because the members insisted they needed a native app. No amount of demonstrating the speed and usability of the web app would convince the majority of the membership that Loomio was better than Facebook Groups, despite Loomio's better suitability to the operation of our organization. Push notifications was a big part of the movement to go back to Facebook Groups. Participation was low on Loomio because people were not getting push notifications the way they do on Facebook. Email notifications were considered a nuisance by many members.

Wow that's really useful feedback thanks Damon.

I know it's 4 years later, but this is the struggle with my group as well.

Loomio 2.0 is going to have a mobile app soon, and push notifications will be included.

It's also worth mentioning that you can now see a full break down of "Seen by" and who has opened their notifications. (try Notification History on a context or a proposal)

OK - but Loomio app just for Android or iOS also?(myself not hugely into it but know people who are)

It will be for both platforms.

That's awesome to hear! Is it "soon" as in "within a month" or "within the year" or not until next year?

Also, cool tip on how to see who has opened their notifications, except there's no way to know if someone has opened their email. Since thats the only way people get notifications right now, and they'd have no reason to open the web app if they don't want to reply, it would seem that the statistic would be unreliable, no?

I feel confident that it means within 3 months, hopefully 2. The notification will be marked as read if they open the email, so it's fairly good at indicating if someone is aware.

Okay!

And what I was getting at was that it's not possible to tell if someone has opened an email. (This is a somewhat by-design privacy feature of email). A clunky email feature called "Read receipts" does exist and can be set up on some clients, but virtually no email clients send them by default. And link tracking only helps if they click a link in the email, so you can't rely on link tracking to tell you if an email has been opened.