[UPDATE: We have an app] We don’t have an iPhone app (yet), and that’s a good thing

UPDATE: There is an Edthena iOS app!

This post adapted from a post appearing on Education Week

Often times, we’re asked about we’re asked whether we have an iPhone app. The answer is that we don’t have one right now. There’s a good reason for it, too.

The reality is that there are finite resources in a small company, and by offering the cross-platform Edthena Video Tool, we can ensure a great experience for all of our users across a variety of video capture devices.

Here’s a bit more on where we stand…

The deficit-based claim about Edthena by a competitor:

Edthena doesn’t have an iPhone app. This is going to make uploading videos a cumbersome and inefficient process. You’ll need to take the video to a computer to do your uploading. We built an iPhone app that makes this very easy for you to upload your video directly to our site from your phone.

Edthena’s view:

Others may focus attention on their iPhone app and how it represents that their technology is more advanced or their technical team is more sophisticated. But the reality is that almost everyone is utilizing a specific third-party company to serve as the underlying technology to power this process.

To be honest, we’ve heard varying reports about the success of uploading long videos on those apps, because it’s a lot of data that needs to be moved off the phone. The apps work best for three-minute videos captured at birthday parties, not 30-minute videos of classroom instruction.

And for all that focus on an iPhone app, how do others meet the needs of non-iPhone users? If there is an option, it’s secondary and not as good as the iPhone method. Get ready for a Java-based uploader and/or an 18-step method for how to compress your video.

It’s true that we don’t offer an iPhone app today — at some point we certainly will — but for now we have prioritized the Edthena Video Tool. The Edthena Video Tool is technology built in-house. This means we can manage and control the entire process. We can react quickly to any issues so that we can deliver on the promise of successful uploads by any user while supporting a multitude of camera devices.

We’ve learned from our partners that equity of access is a big concern when you start thinking about larger deployments. Not everyone has an iPhone. Our current partners confirm that requiring an iOS device is an unreasonable financial burden to place on their users or organization just to have an opportunity to try the “recommended method” for getting videos online.

The Edthena Video Tool enables any user to upload videos from an iPhone with the same level of drag-and-drop simplicity as a three-year-old camera. There is no first-class and economy-class treatment in our model. Everyone gets an excellent, headache-free experience.

As our company grows, we have plans to support native applications for both iPhone and Andriod platforms. But in the meantime, we’ll be staying the course with the Edthena Video Tool and directing our resources toward some really exciting and advanced features for our web application set to release this fall.

photo image credit: apples.jp cc