iPhone SalesForce app: free, but access = $
A quickie I left out of my original iPhone app roundup: I wasn’t able to get the mobile SalesForce client working. The reason is, in retrospect, unsurprising: our company doesn’t have an “unlimited” SalesForce license, and customers on cheaper plans will be nickeled and dimed to use the app.
It’s good to see that some nasty business models are going to survive on the iPhone platform. So is my response: the SalesForce app is deleted.
They left a great space for others to build add-ons. It is not necessarily all bad, because competition usually benefits the customer. We developed MintFly using the APIs, so Professional and above licenses don’t require the Salesforce Mobile license.
The same thing is done with Email marketing – vertical response is incredibly popular and they provide a lot more features and keep up with CAN SPAM laws. They built a company that caters to that specific thing… if Salesforce had to manage all those features, the price of a normal Salesforce license would be much higher. So, I don’t think it’s all a bad thing.
The API salesforce offers is great, and we just released Search2GO which utilizes it to allow native access from the iPhone and is now available on the iTunes AppStore.
It isn’t designed to do what Salesforce Mobile does (provide full offline access) but it does allow you quick access to the key Salesforce objects quickly (even over Edge or 3G).
Check it out here:
http://www.modelmetrics.com/solutions/2go-for-iphone/search2go-for-iphone/
Cheers,
John