Artisan Releases Power Hooks, Letting Non-Techie Folks Tweak Apps

We told you about Artisan Mobile back in May — they are the company that developed a platform that lets non-techie product managers tweak their apps without having to resubmit them to the app store.  Now, the company has released Power Hooks, which allows even more personalization of an app without re-writing code, recompiling the app, or re-submitting to app store.

“What we’re trying to do with Artisan is make it as easy to manage and enhance a mobile app as it is a website,” said Bob Moul, CEO of Artisan.  “This allows you to change to the look and feel of the app and then publish it quickly to your users, do A/B testing, try different designs, see which one’s more effective, then publish the winner, and even personalize a native app based on what we might know about you as a user.”

In addition to being able to tweak fields and tags, Power Hooks lets product managers and marketers go deep inside the app and make it highly configurable through everything from navigation schemes to business logic.   So, for example, if a designer wants to tweak the app to show six products per screen instead of 10, they can easily change it without writing any code or resubmitting it to the app store.  This not only gives business users a tremendous amount of flexibility in configuring the app, it also saves time for developers and marketers.

The process is simple: developers configure the Power Hook once and business users are then free to customize and test ongoing without writing code.  The end result is that Power Hooks puts the customization of the app into the business users hands so they don’t have to rely on app developer to make mundane changes to an app.

“What we’re trying to build is a collaborative platform where the developers can keep control of the app and the security and performance but give the business users the ability to really use it as a marketing channel– a lot like a website.” Moul said.

Allowing business users to tweak and customize their app as they wish can also help them stand out from the crowd.  With more than 1 million apps in the Apple App Store alone, trying to differentiate yourself becomes nearly impossible.  In fact, more than 60 percent of the apps in the App Store have never been downloaded, according to analytical firm Adeven.  Moul believes that Artisan can help apps gain a competitive advantage.

“You really have to work hard to capture people’s attention when they’re using your app and keep them coming back for more,” Moul said.  “The ways to do that are to be continually improving the app through testing and also through personalization.”