For almost a year now PC2Paper have had an iPhone and iPad friendly version of our site. We haven't talked about it much except in our chat forum where we were trying to get people to test out the beta version of this site. The users that have tested it have also discovered that the site works quite well with other mobile devices such as Android and the mobile version of the Opera browser.
The site is limited to a small subsection of functionality and this is primarily writing letters and viewing saved, waiting to be sent and sent letters. We did this primarily as we didn't know how the micro site would be perceived and planned on adding more functionality gradually as it gained in popularity.
Why haven't you developed an iPhone/iPad app yet?
We have been asked this on several occasions, we have had several companies offer to develop us one and we have also had a version of an app sitting on one of our development machines. Developing an iPhone/iPad friendly website is a lot easier than developing an app. A website is also a lot easier to support than an app that sits on the iPhone or iPad. We also know there is a definite benefit to having an iPhone and iPad app, one of these would be the ability to write your letters offline and then sync the iPhone or iPad back with your PC2Paper account when your device was back online. In order to do this we would need to cache a lot of data on the device itself such postage costs, letters and account details and make sure this is all synchronised with your account when you are back online. To do this we would also have to build the infrastructure on our website to support this kind of functionality. When you look at it this way you can see all the bits that would have to make up our application.
In short we wouldn't want to release an app just for the sake of releasing one that gave a pretty poor experience and a very small section of functionality that just didn't provide any more benefit than what a web friendly version of our site for your phone would do.
Going forward
We would welcome any feedback on the mobile version of our site. This should help us to add more functionality which is of benefit to you when constantly on the move.