We got some exciting news for all of you! The latest version of phpFox Mobile App, version 1.8.3, is finally here. The latest version of the phpFox Mobile App comes packed with various improvements that will improve your users’ social networking experience. Here’s what it’s all about!

New Features/ Improvements

• Support Android target 31 (ensures that users benefit from security, privacy, and performance improvements)
• UX improvement for the “Call Audio/ Video” display screen
• Swipe down to close on the photo detail

Bug Fixes

We’ve ironed out a number of bugs and issues, ensuring that the app runs smoothly and efficiently.

• Although the user has entered data, the “Share” button is still inactive
• ChatPlus – The user cannot add the attachment while responding to a message
• ChatPlus – The user cannot search the group using just one character
• ChatPlus – “Members” tab for the archived group is missing
• GIFs cannot be sent with Samsung keyboard devices
• Crash issue when building iOS with Xcode 14

More: phpFox Mobile 1.8.3 Release Notes.

How to Upgrade to phpFox Mobile 1.8.3?

Open a Mobile Build ticket in our Client Area to request us to upgrade your mobile apps.

Upgrade now and get all these new features and improvements added to your social networks! 

Don’t hesitate to submit tickets or report immediately to our Client Area for any issue. We’re constantly working to improve your phpFox experience. We always appreciate any feedback to make phpFox better, hence please feel free to share with us your ideas. 

Scrolling through the activity feed for updates is a habit of every user on social media. Here, we outline the definition, benefits, use cases, and best practices of the activity feed, and ways you can easily integrate this vital feature into your own mobile platform.

In This Article:

1. What is an Activity Feed?
2. Benefits of Creating an Activity Feed
3. Real Examples of Activity Feed
4. Implementing Activity Feed In Your App

What is an Activity Feed?

Sometimes called a newsfeed or activity stream, an activity feed is a real-time list of actions performed by users on an app or website. Activity feeds display information from a user’s online community such as likes, follows, comments, posts, and content shares.

Feeds are an effective way for apps and websites to keep users engaged in their platform and motivated to interact and connect with others. Activity feeds positively impact an app or website’s key performance indicators such as retention rates, session length, engagement, and overall user satisfaction, making them a vital software component for community-centered platforms such as social apps like Facebook and Instagram, and professional tools like Microsoft Teams and Hubspot.

Not only social apps, activity feeds can also be integrated and used in different niche social networks, e.g. sports, travel, gaming, education, etc. Before looking into the real examples, let’s go through the key benefits activity feeds can bring to your app.

Benefits of creating an activity feed

An activity feed helpfully organizes what your users see first when they login to your app. Here is why your app needs one:

It is great for collecting user feedback

The activity feed is that forum where you and your users can interact frequently. The upshot is that you gain access to end users’ feedback directly, including what’s working about the app, and any problems they’re facing.

You are able to better understand how they are using the app, where they are facing a problem, what they expect more from it, and how you can improve it further for them. Nothing better than real user insights to better your product!

It makes customer support easier

While collecting feedback from the activity feed, you’re probably going to stumble across a few complaints. You can then use your feeds to clear the issue up by offering immediate and direct support to the end user. This means they don’t even need to leave the app and head to another channel. Instead, you can keep them inside the app, which will increase customer satisfaction and engagement at the same time.

It makes measuring user reactions easy

Continuing on the point above, when you make broadcast announcements, you’re bound to get reactions – positive and negative. On activity feeds, you can immediately see how the users are reacting to an announcement. You can measure the success of it in terms of likes and comments – this also gives you a chance to make the users better understand something new on the app, by getting their announcement reaction before going live with that feature.

It makes the interaction between users easy

Notice how easy it is to like a friend’s picture on Facebook and drop a comment on an article you liked? The ease of the platform when it comes to interacting with others is what draws you back to it. It lets users track what others are doing, like, or comment on their activity and interact socially. This also keeps them engaged in the app for much longer.

It helps build stronger communities

At the end of the day, all the above-mentioned benefits contribute to the development of a loyal and vibrant in-app community. Strong communities help retain existing users and reduce user acquisition costs for businesses by 90%.

Real examples of activity feed

Looking for some inspiration for your app? Wondering how to implement an activity feed of your own? Let us dispel all your doubts by looking into how feeds are used in different app categories.

Health & Fitness: Strava

Strava is a social network for cycling, running, and triathlon athletes. The activity feed is basically the home screen of Strava, where users share their activities and workouts, comment on them, and cheer each other up

.

One of the great things that Strava offers is the ability to share group events or include other users in your activity if they didn’t have anything to track it with themselves, or if you just happen to be exercising with someone else.

The Strava smartphone app also has a friend finder on the Feed page – it’s a social network after all and making connections is part of what you’re supposed to do.

Travel: TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is a full-fledged social network for travelers. All users, including hotels, and restaurants are now able to create personalized profiles and follow their friends and trusted experts, including bloggers, popular brands, and influencers.

Users can look up and save useful content in a convenient format and share it by using a dynamic feed of videos, articles, guides, and reviews. TripAdvisor members can also create “trips” in their profiles, which can become guides, itineraries, or wish lists for future travels. This content may be for personal use, or it may be shared to help other members of the community find the best vacation and accommodation options.

The user’s home page is converted into a personalized news feed. When searching for a specific destination, the feed automatically narrows the information displayed to a specific geo-location. In the first place, the feed will display the most suitable options for a particular user with the highest rating from friends and people they follow.

Education: Duo Lingo

The Activity stream was a section that held a record of the activity on Duolingo, including discussions created, comments posted, sentences translated, lessons completed, and course levels attained. In addition, users could review a record of activity from everyone they’ve followed. Users could also see a record of what they’ve done by clicking on their username in the Blue Bar at the top of the screen.

Social Network: Instagram

Feeds are a core functionality for social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. One of the most popular is photo-centric Instagram. Instagram’s personalized feed leverages machine learning to populate new and relevant content to users in order to keep audiences scrolling.

Implementing activity feed into your app

Activity feeds have the potential to turn your app into the new socializing channel for mobile users. With phpFox, you can build social news feeds and notifications into your mobile app in no time. Let users create engaging content and engage with others through comments and reactions. Users follow other users or topics and become members of various groups to get a personalized timeline of content.

Ready to give it a try? Get started now or contact us to request a demo and ask for advice.

phpFox Mobile App version 1.4

Here are the highlighted features in the phpFox Mobile App version 1.4

– User subscription

– Reactions and Status Background

– Have push notification for new messages.

– Support more components for 3rd-party app integration.

User subscription

Subscription is always one of the main phpFox monetization features that bring site owner money. This is why we decided to prioritize this feature in mobile apps in this version. In particular, on mobile apps, users will be able to choose subscription plans when signing up, upgrade subscription in the Account Settings area, and then proceed purchase with Paypal or activity points as the web version. This feature will make your users feel more comfortable because they can subscribe to a package on either web or mobile apps.

Reactions and Status Background

As you may know, these features were first introduced on Facebook a few years ago and quickly become Must-Have key features for any social network site to increase user engagement. Thus, we decided to support them on our mobile apps by default. By upgrading your mobile apps to version 1.4, your users will have the ability to react to a post or comment with their true mood like Haha, Wow, Like, Sad, etc and decorate their statuses with attractive backgrounds. It is necessary to note that you will need to install the Reactions app and Feed Status Background app on the phpFox site.

Push Notification for new messages

Similar to other popular Messenger apps, your users can receive a push notification when their friends send them new messages from now. It helps your users still get updates of new messages even though they are not open the app. This feature was proposed by valued feedback from our loyal clients. Thank you for always standing by us. For sure that phpFox always keeps listening to our client feedback in order to make phpFox better day by day.

Support more components for 3rd-party app integration.

3rd-party apps on phpFox Store are always important parts of phpFox. Our team continues supporting more API and layout components to help 3rd-party experts integrate their products to our mobile apps easier and quicker. Our documentation for apps integration solution is going to update frequently. Therefore, please keep watching our Developer documentation in order to receive our latest updates.

How to upgrade phpFox Mobile apps

It is necessary to note that the new features in phpFox Mobile app version 1.4 are only available when using with Mobile API 4.3.0. If you intend to build your mobile apps by yourself, please don’t forget to upgrade the Mobile API on your phpFox site. If you use our Mobile Build Service, we will help upgrade the Mobile API app while building your mobile apps. You can open a Mobile Build ticket in Client Area to request for Mobile upgrade from now.

Moreover, I can inform that the Mobile API 4.3.0 already supports multiple API versions. It means that your users using the published apps (with older mobile version) could access the site normally after the Mobile API app is upgraded to version 4.3.0.

What’s new on version 1.5?

You may be surprised if knowing that our team has started on mobile app version 1.5. I cannot wait to reveal some info on this new version now. According to our plan, in version 1.5, we are going to have the following significant updates:

– Able to purchase listing items on apps

– Support Mention (Friend Tagging) feature on feed status and comment.

– Improve the stability and performance of IM chat with new technology

– More components for the 3rd-party Integration solution.

– Able to hide feeds of abusive users directly on Home Feed.

– And many other improvements and bug fixes.

Is that cool? However, we still love to have your thoughts. If you are having more suggestions, please don’t hesitate to share with us.

Wanna get Premium mobile apps today!

You can merely purchase new or upgrade your phpFox license to ULTIMATE license to get Premium mobile apps. With Premium mobile apps, you can build your mobile apps under your branding. In particular, you can have:

– Change App Launch Screen, App Icon, Logo, etc.

– Change Color Scheme of your mobile app to comply with the web version

– Distribute mobile apps to Apple Store and Google Play under your Developer account.

And, please stay tuned with us. We are going to get back with interesting news very soon.

Since the first release of iOS and Android apps, we are super excited that many clients are interested in using our Premium mobile apps. We have been receiving many requests to start Mobile Build service. Most of them were completed and their mobile apps are now available on Apple Store and Google Play. It’s fantastic, isn’t it? While working on Mobile Build projects, we are so thankful for many valuable suggestions, positive feedback as well as issue reports. They are a big motivation for us to continuously improve our mobile apps with more features as well as make them more stable. Now, let’s take a look at what’s new in the mobile version 1.3

phpFox Mobile App version 1.3

In this new mobile app version, on top of many bug fixes to make mobile apps more stable, we supported 3 main improvements / new features below:

– Monetization with Google Admob

– Performance and UI/UX Improvements

– Integration solution for 3rd-party apps

Monetization with Google Admob Integration

The mobile app version 1.3 support displaying ads by Google Admob. Mobile Ads can be configured easily in AdminCP. You can have either banner ads displaying on top or bottom or full-page ads (Interstitial, Rewarded type) of specific pages on mobile apps. You will see that many ads settings are supported, such as which location and how often ads display, ads priority, etc.

Performance and UI/UX Improvements

We always do care about the Performance, design, and user experience on phpFox mobile apps. In the aspect of performance, we improved the loading speed of both app and user content. We also use Lazy loading that the images are only loaded whenever they need to be displayed. These improvements and other native animations added make the phpFox mobile apps work obviously smoother and faster.

Integration solution for 3rd-party apps

We totally understand that 3rd-party phpFox apps are a very important part of every phpFox site as they help fulfill more functionalities. We have received many questions about how 3rd-party apps could work on phpFox Mobile Apps. In mobile version 1.3, our team has been working really hard to design and implement a mechanism for integration solution. Any 3rd-party experts can merely add necessary APIs to their phpFox apps to make their features work on the phpFox Mobile app. It is amazing, isn’t it? The detailed Development Guide has been prepared and will be published on phpFox Developer Documents very soon.

How to upgrade phpFox Mobile apps

It is necessary to note that the phpFox Mobile app version 1.3 is released along with Mobile API 4.2.0 and RESTful API 4.2.2. Please do not upgrade Mobile API if you are using Premium Mobile apps version older than mobile version 1.3. You can open a Mobile Build ticket in Client Area to request for Mobile upgrade from now.

What’s next?

In the next version of mobile apps, we are going to have the following features:

– Push notifications when having new messages

– Subscription

– Reactions and status with background

Have other suggestions? Please don’t hesitate to share with us.

Wanna get Premium mobile apps

You can merely purchase new or upgrade your phpFox license to ULTIMATE license to get Premium mobile apps. With Premium mobile apps, you can build your mobile apps under your branding. In particular, you can have:

– Change App Launch Screen, App Icon, Logo, etc.

– Change Color Scheme of your mobile app to comply with the web version

– Distribute mobile apps to Apple Store and Google Play under your Developer account.

On daily basis, people nowadays almost live in smartphones. We work, watch, listen, communicate, do a lot of stuff there. Definitely, your phpFox Social Network needs a mobile app as a comprehensive source of online content and harnessing users’ desire for social connection anytime, anywhere.

Building up with the mindset of easy-to-use yet completed and full-featured, the app has all the tools you can expect from a Social mobile app. In term of appearance, the app consists of a sleek interface which applies incredible user experience techniques.

Expected to be an extra boost to amplify users’ awareness of your community, phpFox iOS app truly enhances social connectivity with real-time access. The app guarantees a higher conversion rate return and cost-efficient values to your Social Network.

Let’s take a quick tour now

Want to experience the mobile app?

We have published our phpFox iOS Mobile app on the Apple Store and set up the phpFox site for demo purpose. You can go to AppStore on your iOS device and search for “phpFox“, then download and install the app named phpFox. Or click on the button below.

Demo Server URL: https://mobileapi.phpfox.com

User: phpfoxtest1@phpfox.com

Password: 123456

New Update on phpFox Licenses

Coming along with the official release of the iOS mobile app, we are glad to inform you about the new phpFox license type: phpFox V4 Ultimate license. The phpFox V4 Ultimate license has all features of the phpFox V4 Pro license and includes Premium Mobile version.

With Premium Mobile version, we will build your mobile apps with your branding and distribute to Apple Store and Google Play under your Developer accounts. On top of all phpFox branding and copyright will be removed, you can:

– Change App Splash Screen

– Change Color Scheme of mobile app

You can refer to this article for more info about our Premium Mobile Build Process

If you are holding Lite, Basic and Pro licenses, you can start upgrading your phpFox licenses to phpFox V4 Ultimate licenses from now. Please follow our guide here.

Or you want to purchase new phpFox licenses right now, please click on the button below.

And one more thing,

In addition to phpFox V4 Ultimate with Premium Mobile version, we are going to have a new phpFox license which will allow you to use the default phpFox Mobile apps for your phpFox community. These mobile apps are published under phpFox Developer accounts on Apple Store and Google Play. They will be upgraded regularly during development. However, the phpFox branding and copyright can’t be removed in this mobile app version. Instead, you will be able to configure to display your site Logo on Login Screen and inside phpFox mobile apps (after logging in). For detailed guidance to use this phpFox Mobile version, please refer to this article.

And, we are happy to offer the default phpFox Mobile version to those who are using phpFox V4 Pro licenses from now to Dec 31st, 2018. Please open tickets in Client Area to request for this Mobile app version.

Having any questions or need support?

Please feel free to contact us in the Client Area or drop us messages to hello@phpfox.com

We welcome any opinions and feedback on how you feel and how we can improve the app in the future.

Carry your community and keep updated anywhere with phpFox iOS Mobile app!