iPhone App Partnership?

I know there are a whole bunch of iPhone and Droid and whatever apps that do forum reading and posting much more quickly and cleanly than trying to load the whole page in the browser. I believe most of them require nothing much from the moderators -- you just copy a piece of code in, or use an automatic installer. Most are free.

Have you guys considered doing this?

From my experience reading some other forums (gasp!), I think TapATalk is a good option. The basic app is free, and allows you to read all you like. Posting requires the upgrade, which is inexpensive. The layout is simple and clean, and it works very fast. I do not think the upgrade thing is an issue, because it's such a pain to type on an iPhone anyway that mostly I, at least, would surf the site through TapATalk, and do any posting from my computer as usual.

Adding the TapATalk code to the forum is apparently very simple: the sysadmin just pastes an independent block of code and it's all set. There are no ads, even on the free edition, which is a plus.

What do you think, Nicko et al? Can we do this?

The main advantage of TapATalk, as far as I can see, is that it loads and surfs very rapidly, and is laid out very cleanly for reading. Other apps that I've looked at are no better and usually quite a bit worse --- and doing it through the web browser (Safari) is amazingly, horribly slow. One reason TapATalk is so nice and clean is that it's a for-pay app, but by comparison to other for-pay forum surfing apps I've seen it's (a) at least as clean as any other, and (b) quite inexpensive for those who actually want to upgrade to the full for-pay version.

Thanks for looking into this, Nicko!