Mobile Forms and Applications Blog

Just because the Kindle Fire was designed from the ground up to promote media consumption and online shopping, that doesn’t mean it won’t be used for serious business applications.

A funny thing happened in the Appstore

When Amazon opened their Appstore for Android earlier this year, we went ahead and submitted Forms Central, our mobile business forms app. Why not? It wasn’t clear what the reach would be, so we decided to get into the store and see what would happen. What happened was not much. Our app sat there for several months, smoldering, not exactly burning up the field with downloads.

Then something happened when Amazon released the Kindle Fire. Even before we could get our hands on one, our system started lighting up with Kindles — meaning people were downloading our business app on their Kindle Fire media tablets and logging in to try our software-as-a-service offering.

That may seem odd. The Appstore, after all, doesn’t even have a “business” category to look in for apps.

Business Apps on a Kindle Fire?

The Kindle Fire was clearly designed from the ground up to optimize non-work-related activities such as reading books, watching movies or shopping online. That’s a much different profile than our app, which enables much less entertaining tasks like dispatching workers, submitting inspection reports, and capturing signatures.

What sparks such interest in our business app among users of an entertainment-oriented device? Here are a few possible explanations, starting with the obvious one:

1The Low Price Point. If your business could acquire a stack of Kindle Fire tablets for under half the price of a stack of iPads, and if they both ran exactly the same custom Formotus business forms, what would be the deciding factor for you?

2The Android OS. Android has become a known and respected OS for business applications. The Kindle Fire doesn’t look like most Android tablets, but that’s what it is. And that’s why our app runs on it, just like it does on every Android we’ve tried: Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy, you name it.

3The Tablet Form Factor. It came as no real surprise to us that people would be interested in trying our business forms app on their new tablet — any tablet. If you want to replace paper forms and clipboards with a mobile device, the tablet sizes are all much more appealing than smartphones.

4BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Not all business is conducted on enterprise-owned devices. The infiltration of personal-liable devices into the enterprise has been one of the hot trends of 2011, led by the iPad. Our Forms Central app carves out a ‘business center‘ under company control on a personal device otherwise used for mostly entertainment purposes (like watching Towering Inferno or reading Farenheit 451).