Building Beautiful Products

Subsplash is a company that loves the web. We see mobile as a natural extension of the web. We believe in building beautiful products that delight our customers as well as providing them with the greatest reach possible for their content. So naturally we follow what's going on within the mobile landscape very closely. Being a company that builds both custom applications and supports a content management platform that has a far and deep reach in the mobile landscape it is a requirement for us as a company to stay objective. We take this very seriously and feel as though the moment that we start being emotionally tied to an individual platform is the moment that we've failed at being able to deliver the best possible solutions to our customers. We have an obligation to stay informed, to inform our clients, and to stay ahead of the trends.

For us not being emotionally tied to any one platform doesn't mean that we're naive enough to believe that all platforms are created equal. They're not, not by a long shot. And as individuals we all have our own preferences per platform. Some of us at Subsplash are iOS enthusiasts. Others are Android or Windows Phone 7 fans. But in the end we're all just a bunch of fans of great designs and alluring applications.

Here at Subsplash we think the important thing when tackling any mobile application that will live among many different platforms is to keep the focus on design first. What that means is that our paradigm for designing applications must be different than if we were designing and building a one off platform specific application. Instead of designing within the boundaries of iOS, Android, WP7, or any other specific platform we design for the application first. After we have the application design finished we can then adapt that design to a specific platform so that it feels natural on that platform and so that it takes advantages of the strengths and uniqueness of that platforms capabilities.

So instead of designing a great iOS experience and porting it to Android or WP7 we ask ourselves how can we design a great experience. After that great experience is created it can then be adapted to be a great iOS, Android, WP7, or other experience. Our experience is defined by what we're trying to build and not by any one device that we're trying to build it for.

A good example of this is our media player experience on the Subsplash platform (for which The Church App is a part of). It's pleasant to look at with consistent functionality across all our supported platforms. But as we bring it to any platform we adapt the UI slightly or the functionality slightly to make it feel natural on that device. This has resulted in our media player having a consistent and delightful experience that feels natural on whatever platform you're using it on.