Where's our open-source, free, customizable, native mobile solution?

SuiteCRM Forum - English Language SuiteCRM General Discussion
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Hello everyone.

I have been getting a bit philosophical about an issue related to SuiteCRM, and I would like to hear others about this…

We can use SuiteCRM via a web browser on our tablets and and smartphones. It’s an OK solution - the theme is responsive to the screen size. A lot of serious work can be done this way.

But there will always be a case to be made for a native app. It’s surely faster, and allows for more interaction with the OS, which is important for many tasks.

For this we have a great app, QuickCRM. Maybe there are also others that I haven’t tried. It has a price tag, but I would say it’s reasonable, and just recently they added some bits of record editing and creating features to the basic (free) version, which is great!

But no matter how much I am content with QuickCRM, as I develop our CRM solution and add customizations to SuiteCRM, I keep thinking: shouldn’t I be able to customize the mobile app too? Do I need to pay a company to customize it for me? I can’t afford that sort of thing.

So, looking ahead a few years from now… shouldn’t this open Source project called SuiteCRM have an open source platform for native Android/iOS apps, so that the community could progressively build that up?

I don’t want to ruin business for QuickCRM, maybe they can be part of the solution by open-sourcing some parts of their code, if they can make a business-model out of selling customizations.

But I do think that from the SuiteCRM point of view we’re not going the right way if we stick to closed apps…

What do you think? I’d love to hear opinions from SalesAgility, from QuickCRM and from anyone else interested in this project…

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Well it seems nobody else is getting philosophical : - )

Also, I fear my post (especially the title) might have left that feeling of entitlement, like “somebody get me what I want now, for free!”… but that wasn’t my intention at all.

So, to bring this down to earth: is it too hard if somebody makes a space in SuiteCRM’s Github and uploads a simple skeleton of a mobile app? Like something to search contacts, for example. And maybe the ability to edit one or two fields, just to have some code doing updates to our database.

Then people (me included) could develop their basic necessary features and contribute, slowly building a more complete solution.

I have the impression that even the simplest mobile apps sometimes have a huge utility - sometimes all you need is a way to tick some check-box in SuiteCRM quickly, while on the move.

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