Watch Meetup’s Chief Technology Officer, Rajib Ahmed, and Director of Engineering, Annyce Davis, to learn about what is planned for native apps in 2021 including architecture improvements, enhanced support for online events, and other upcoming features.
Main Takeaways:
- Plans to improve the Meetup app experience:
- First, we’re going to focus on boosting the quality of the current apps. That involves the following three things: establishing and adhering to mobile app best practices, defining personas to target features in order to increase desired behaviors, and increasing the overall discoverability of our apps.
- The second prong of the strategy is releasing a new organizer app.
We want this app to provide quality event and group management capabilities. It’s also going to integrate the Organizer content that we’ve been created to help you with growth.
- If you have any feedback or suggestions for the app plan, please fill out this survey!
Top Q&A Questions:
- Why do we feel like it’s important to do this now.?
- Annyce: If you’ve attended some of our previous Meetup Live events, you found out that we’ve been focusing a lot on tech debt and removing the majority of our API to GraphQL. With that move, that opens up the opportunity for us to consume this data. Also, we have an extremely talented native apps team right now that has grown to a very solid size. We’re really trying to take advantage of that and execute on this vision.
- Are you thinking about anything for offline mode?
- Annyce: We definitely are. You may want to check if you’re on iOS, I believe, if you’re on your home screen, and then you lose connectivity, you should still be able to see it even now.
- Is the web-based browser access to meet up going to be phased out?
- Rajib: No, it will not.
I think separately, we’re doing a lot of changes on the website to modernize it as well. We’re taking advantage of what we can do best on both sides so there’s a lot of rework happening.
- Rajib: No, it will not.
- I would like to hear more about the membership app, what is changing.
- Rajib: I just want to reiterate that anything that’s great about our apps, any of the functionalities that you’re used to, now that we know that users love, we’re not looking to change those. We know that there are best practices and might modernize the UI to make it easier to use, but the core features and fundamentals will never go away. I don’t want anyone to think we’re moving away or we’re making drastic changes.
Last modified on June 23, 2021
