Xero Touch
At last week’s Xero Conference we demoed a world preview of our new mobile version (so new that most of the Xeroes that were in attendance had never seen it before either!). When we first started Xero having a mobile version was a nice-to-have, but nowadays it’s a basic feature and we have made a conscious effort in 2011 to make it a core part of our product development strategy (in the same way we have with our API). Therefore when we talk about new features the mobile implications of those features are paramount.
Building a mobile application is very different to building a desktop application. I would suggest reading Josh Clark’s excellent book Tapworthy to get an idea of the decisions you need to make to build a successful mobile application. You need to design for mobile – mobile forces you to focus on only the most important data and interactions. The end result should be an experience that’s heavily optimized towards key tasks and consumption. It sounds constraining – but it’s actually a liberating experience.
One key decision we needed to make was whether we built an “app” specific for each device, or a mobile-optimized web-based version. Obviously the biggest drawcard of a native app is access to the phone’s hardware – an app can usually access anything the device offers (precise geolocation including device orientation using the compass, accelerometer, audio input, image capture/input from a camera including video etc). The other big drawcard is access to the ecosystem surrounding the device. In the world of smartphones, operating system like iOS and Android include a massive ecosystem of apps and from a marketing and positioning perspective being in those app stores and having access to those ecosystems is huge.
But the downside is having to maintain lots of versions of the app – writing code for iOS is very different to writing code for Android – and having access to the resources to maintain those codebases is difficult.
Fortunately there are ways to be web-based but still provide a native experience.
Anyone that knows me knows I’m a big fan of open web technologies, so my preference has always been to go web. My counterpart at Facebook, Bret Taylor, recently outlined a vision where he stated “the end goal is that we’ll be able to develop one version of Facebook for mobile devices”. And this is my vision for Xero.
HTML5 and its slew of accompanying technologies (and yes, I include CSS3 in that) is becoming very powerful. Coupled with that is the increasing use of WebKit in today’s modern smartphones. WebKit, an open source project, has led the way in innovating mobile development, with HTML5 support, CSS3 extensions, and touch events. If you have an iOS-based device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) or an Android phone you are already using a WebKit-based browser. Blackberry 6 and HP/Palm’s webOS have also moved to WebKit. It’s become the defacto standard of the modern mobile web.
To enable us to work with the best WebKit can offer we chose Sencha Touch as our app framework. Sencha Touch is built specifically to leverage HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript to develop web apps that look and feel native. By allowing us to make heavy use of JavaScript (a language I’ve espoused my love for in an earlier post) we’re able to speed up our development timeframes significantly. And by developing for the web, we’re able to deliver on our vision of a single app running on multiple platforms.
Sencha Touch also works beautifully with PhoneGap, an open source project that allows us to deliver our web-based application as native – not only providing access to the low-level API’s of the devices, but also allowing us to package the app for deployment through the relevant app stores.
Sencha Touch has been a joy to work with. It’s enabling us to maximize our development efforts and deliver a superior mobile experience. (For those interested in learning more I’m talking at the Wellington Javascript meetup in a couple of weeks on it – follow me on Twitter to learn more).
So when’s it going to be released? Soon… We’re trying a lean startup approach to the development of this product so we’re hoping a beta can be out in the next month.
Answers to questions I know you’ll ask:
- the apps will be free
- we will also be releasing a web-delivered version of the app for those not wanting to use the app store (though functionality will be reduced so we wouldn’t encourage this)
- m.xero.com will continue to be supported for lower-level devices (unfortunately lower-level includes WIndows Phone 7 at this stage – the phone is pretty great but the browser is crap)
- even though this mobile app will scale well on an iPad, we are currently NOT working on a specific iPad version. Currently the “normal” version of Xero works pretty well on an iPad but we’re hoping to improve the usability of all our applications for touch-based tablet devices (which may include tablet specific features)
- you won’t have to apply to be in the beta – we’ll release it to everyone as soon as it’s ready but expect some rough edges
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82 comments
Congratulations! Can’t wait to get my hands on it! 
This is going to be awesome, I can’t wait to get this out to the market.
Well done Craig & team.
Cheers, Rhys
James R
Nice one brother!
Looks great!
This is great news. I just got started with Xero and am really liking it. Any plans to replace the Flash graphs so that everything shows up well on the iPad? My goal is to do all of my accounting in Xero while I sit on my couch .
Lovely!
I still want to be on the beta for the beta!!! 
Darryl Collins
+1 for iPad friendly graphs!
smallfurrything
This is brilliant news and I’m very excited.
+ 1 for iPad friendly friendly graphs!
Actually 1 vote for an iPad app too, or just make it work better on Apple’s shoddy iPad Safari -good luck with that
Keep it up, Xero!
smallfurrything
sounds great. yes +1 for new graphs (drop flash).
Exciting stuff – look forward to seeing this.Another +1 for HTML5 graphs, I see they work in Xero Personal so would be great to have this same functionality on my iPhone in Xero.
This is great news, and interesting to observe your choices around mobile/HTML5 frameworks.
+1 for replacing Flash graphs across the board; you’re one of 3 sites that require me to use Flash (Google Analytics and Prezi being the other two.)
Well done, Xero. This will be a great step forward!
oliverw
Great news! Look forward to seeing it and thanks for letting us know it’s coming.
+1 for iPad friendly graphs. When discussing things at the cafe with my business partner/bookkeeper etc the iPad is we prefer to use
So I’m a little confused. Will it be a:
1. Separate application I need to download that will work across all Mobile devices? OR
2. Automatically served by m.xero.com whenever I login to Xero using my Mobile?
Cheers
Great news but confusing blog entry.
When I read the title I quickly started scanning the article to determine whether it was simply a refined mobile website or a native iOS app. You start of saying what’s great about native apps then the down sides. But then you don’t say, “and so we decided to build a native app..”
Afterwards you say, “the apps will be free” which you would assume means native apps, but people use the word apps for web apps, mobile apps, desktop apps, etc these days. Fortunately the next two bullets better solidify that you did built an actual app that users will be able to download from the app store.
Would be good if you made that clearer. I’ve used Sencha for non native apps (web apps), but interesting to see you incorporating it into a native app.
Daemon
In terms of the Android space, we are experimenting with using the interface with a 7″ pad, for tradesmen/people, who go out to a site, do a job, go home and forget to write an invoice, or leave things out. The new development has saved us a motza as we say here at the bottom of the Earth, and the new moves sound to be just what we need.
Great news. Very excited. +1 for iPad friendly graphs. Campaign Monitor is a great example of how well these work.
Paul
Oh not Craig – “Either way we’re talking about targeting iOS (iPhone/iPod Touch) and Android as our primary devices.” Ugh, what about BlackBerry??? Still the tool of choice for many many business people (obviously myself included). Please don’t forget us and ideally on BB5, not just BB6.
Archer McRae
Fantastic, will this be able to invoice rapidly on the iphone.
Toni
Blackberry would be great! It would definitely make my life eaiser!
ooops I meant easier!
[...] of online accounting vendor Xero, talking about the trade-offs his company has had to look at when developing its mobile version, called Xero Touch. It’s a very informative account and gives a strong flavor of some of the factors to bear in [...]
Paul, it’s much harder than you’d think to create a consistent mobile web app for both new and older devices, particularly when most newer phones and OSes are based on touchscreen rather than the old BB approach of a trackball/pad. We decided to take the same approach as Xero for ProWorkflow Mobile and focus on where mobile development is heading rather than trying to support all older devices, there are simply too many of them. I think we’ll be seeing many more HTML5-based apps over the coming months/years because the development path is simple and with iOS and Android as the dominant mobile OSes it makes sense to support both with as little effort as possible.
Brad
@Craig – Will you be using extJS 4.0 when it comes out? If so, will you be trying their native graphing support?
Ross Howard
Nice choice to use sencha + phonegap. I only wish the phonegap toolchain was a little simpler.
Paul Macnicol
This is great news and just advances this product even further. I recently tested Saasu, its a good product but I think they are in a different space with their upgrade speed to new technologies. I use android phone and tablet and Zero works just great on both. Look forward to the new improvements.
sorry that should be Xero.
Scott
Do you guys have an approx release date for this APP?
Ish
So I noticed you now have an iphone pic on the homepage which looks like it has a xero app running on it. Squealing with joy I immediately started hunting for it, eventually I came across this almost hidden blog link only to find it’s still in dev – what a tease! Anyway, I can’t wait till it’s officially released.
Rosemary
Will the app be available to android os 1.5? I bought a brand new phone less than 6 months ago that came with android 1.5. Telecom don’t seem to be bothered pushing through an update from Motorola either. If only I’d known about the different operating systems before I bought it!!
I love how Craig tried to sneak ‘late March’ in there.
This is a new technique we haven’t yet seen from Craig where he has tried to ‘go public’ with a date, in response to the numerous techniques I have used on him for many years (http://www.drury.net.nz/2007/11/26/on-management/)
I’m proud of him for attempting such a move. However, and risking an arms race, I’m happy to call his bluff and state publicly I would be very disappointed if it is as long as late March.
We have ways of applying pressure internally. (cue evil laugh)
Rod
Excellent read Craig! And glad to hear that your choice of PhoneGap will allow access to the native APIs. There is one feature that I would really like to see: the ability to use the phone camera to take a photo of a receipt and have it added to my expense claim. And the ultimate would be the use of OCR and some clever logic to automatically fill in my expense claim!
Thanks Craig and what an idea Kelvin! Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could just put your mountains of invoices through the scanner in the office and voila they turn up in Xero. As far as the android os I believe it is Telecom (in my case) that don’t push the upgrade through. It was certainly a trick for new players of android. I had no idea that a brand new phone would come with an outdated OS. FYI anything pre 1.6 is limited on voice apps. At least Bill Gates lets you purchase an upgrade!! I can’t even do that! So I’m sure hoping that Xero will be available to the older versions – can’t wait to see it.
looking forward to using this on my iphone .
Nigel
I’m with Kelvin.
And a process for purchase invoices too, receipts for debit card payments at the moment of making the transaction etc, too.
For purchase invoices, how about snap a pic on the iphone, you OCR for numbers and/or supplier name, and then suggest a selection of matching purchase invoices for it to link to. For the user it is one photo, and one touch to identify the corresponding entry. Almost quicker than filing!
For Debit Card transactions you could snap the receipt at the point of purchase, key in the amount, and throw away the physical receipt. The photo would then be waiting on the bank rec screen with the bank feed the next morning.
So much potential. You must have fun brainstorming this!
Grant
Sencha Touch + PhoneGap for a super slick native app built with web technologies – genius!
Expanding on Rosemary’s and Nigel’s ideas, I think it would be great if source document images were not just an iPhone / Android feature, but an integral part of the Xero system. It would be really useful to be able to photograph or scan all of my source documents (e.g. receipts, tax invoices, etc…) and then have them linked to the respective Xero transaction. That way, when I look at old transactions and want to remind myself of the unrecorded detail, I can just open up the image of the corresponding document without having to physically go through my filing system. I imagine that this would be really useful for my accountant too.
[...] Source » [...]
Jerry Zhao
I heard App Store regected some SaaS app last couple of month. Hoping it will be fine for Xero…
alYsa
I think it is very weird decission to make an app in HTML5 and then port it to iOS/Android. JavaScript is definitely not the language that you can develop and debug easily.
I guess the only reason to do that is someone is not confident in iOS or Android tools?
I am in a simmilar boat where we are trying to decide how to do development for our web and phone application. So I wonder if you still think phonegap is a great platform and eases the development when targeting multiple platforms?
Dear Craig et al,
I have been reading your posts with great interest since my accountant reccommended Xero. I travel a lot for work & have no real regular pattern to my life or times to do my accounting, and therefore I get behind with it easily. If I could manage my accounts on my iPhone in any spare moment it would be a really tremendous help, flash graphs or not!
We haven’t signed up to Xero yet, but if the mobile version will be accessible in whatever form, securely, on iOS pretty soon then it would be THE deciding factor in choosing Xero for me. I look forward to any more updates & news!
John, Wiltshire UK
Bit of an update – today we got to see the app working from a test system on our iPhones – very exciting! A few bugs to be sorted out but a big step forward http://twitpic.com/4agkpz
John (Fry Film)
We were in a similar situation where accounts came second, it was easy to get behind and processes were laborious – until we met Xero
We’ve maybe gone over and above the average XERO user now, but the API let us plug straight into the accounts and with two clicks we can reconcile a days transactions against our own database and card processor – sometimes that’s 10k card transactions a month! Anyone in the office can raise an invoice, from anywhere and the cloud computing aspect full stop means you don’t have to be in the office to be working.
I’ve had a quick look at your website and I think with a small amount of work you could do wonders for your business with Xero.
Very useful blog – we are just on the verge of making that major decision of how to support both iOS and Android in particular for our market research survey software and have been considering exactly this set of tools so it’s good to know that we can leverage someone else’s scars on the back! Thanks for sharing…
Ben
Well now that it is late March and we are yet to see the APp released Rod must now be very disappointed… Definitely looking forward to it coming out and seeing it work on an iPad. Being able to take photos of invoices would be a good feature however I wouldn’t reccomend throwing out the physical receipts just yet, each device has differing camera qualities so the photo of the invoice might not stand up to IRD scrutiny epecially since they would most liekly prefer to see the original rather than a copy.
@Peter @Ben Yes, Rod is starting to get a little antsy Xero Touch is coming along nicely – working through bugs. It’s been an interesting journey through the trials and tribulations of developing in bleeding edge technologies. I recently did a talk on how to build these kinds of apps – I think I could add a dozen new slides to it on all the little intricacies!
And anyway – it’s not too late in March…
Paul Phillips
Any update on a release date?
i hope this is not the start of xero becoming like other companies that are unable to deliver on what they promise…. i have very high hopes for xero and express my belief in the product regularly to clients, i really hope this doesn’t become a trend
@Paul @Ben We’re in the final stages of our QA process, and while it’s always a tough decision to hold back on a release, we pride ourselves on our quality and we don’t want to release something too early. While I think you will love Xero Touch even in it’s V1 form, I would like to apologize for the delay. This is one of the reasons we don’t like to commit to dates – when building an accounting system you have to get things right. While there is always a tension between quality and shipping we like to err on the side of cautiousness. So I’m not going to commit to a date again – that was silly and again I apologize for getting you guys excited and letting you down (if it’s any consolation I feel pretty bad about that and there is just as much pressure internally as there is externally). So we’re working hard to it and it’s looking pretty cool – we’re definitely pumped to get it out there as soon as possible (so we can then start working on V2 ).
Thanks
Craig
“I’m happy to call his bluff and state publicly I would be very disappointed if it is as long as late March.”
Aww, Rod’s making a sad face… 
Lars Mordhorst
Any update on when we can expect a release?
[...] course this is even more interesting now that rival company Xero has announced its own mobile application. It’ll be really interesting to compare and contrast the two [...]
I wouldn’t be expecting it anytime soon Lars. I got quite excited about the release of Xero touch and was very let down. I have now pretty much given up all hope of it coming out anytime in the near future. I understand why Xero would withhold a release to iron out bugs and make sure we got a good workable product but to say that it would be out in march to me meant that it was nearly finished, to get this far into april and it still not be out suggests that it was never as close to being ready for release as Xero made out. This for me is the biggest let down I have had from Xero so far.
@Lars @Ben Released today
We’re sorry it took a bit longer than planned. As you’ll see Xero Touch is a pretty big V1 release. Go and have a play (http://m.xero.com) and give us feedback before we submit to the app store.
I just tried out Xero Touch on my ipad with wifi and accessing it from Rod’s link and something must be wrong because I was left scratching my head at Xero Touch. All I could access was Expense claims, even from the dashboard there was only expense claims and this i for clients that I knew had items to reconcile. I also tried Xero Touch from my android using 3G and after 2 minutes the page still hadn’t loaded so I gave up. Accessed the mobile site from my laptop and was able to see the items to reconcile as well as expense claims so clearly there must be an issue with running xero touch on my ipad, I wonder what is the point of having Xero Touch if it doesn’t work on touch devices?
Craig I am definitely a financial advisor in all 40+ clients and even after mulitple refreshes, closing browsers and reopening I still only get the expense claim screen for my clients. I have an Ipad 1. I am going to the link Rod gives above m.xero.com and it then changes to the Xero Touch link. I give up on Xero Touch
@Ben, sorry. We’ll have a look at your account in detail when the dev team is back on Tuesday, Must be something strange going with your account specifically that we can’t replicate.
Thanks for the help Rod but honestly I don’t think it’s worth the trouble. I was grossly disappointed by the delay in the release and then to find that it is too slow to work on my android smartphone and not work on my iPad 1 was just the icing on the cake. I won’t be attempting to use Xero touch anytime in the near future and I unfortunately must say that I can’t recommend the product to clients when it doesn’t work on my iPad. Sorry guys but since i can’t see it working on the iPad I won’t be going anywhere near Xero touch.
I find the main web interface works very well on the iPad (v1) – and is fully featured. (I don’t mind that the few graphs don’t work.) Touch, once it is an appstore app rather than just a website is going to be brilliant as a portable version for expenses in particular.
Maybe you should brand it as Xero Handheld so people don’t worry so much about it working on their iPads and other tablets.
Anna
It works well on my IPad, looks like Ben is purposely trying to discourage others from using Xero.
Definately not Anna, I am a big fan of Xero that’s why im so disappointed. I recommend the Xero system to all of my clients. For the record I only have an issue with Xero touch. Feel free to come an try Xero touch on my ipad if you think im just trying to put people off xero and you will see that it doesn’t work on my iPad. I am aware it is working on others peoples devices but it’s not working on mine. Xero as accessed from a desktop computer is fantastic and the best accounting software I have had the pleasure of using. I believe that Xero is setting the standard for how future accounting is going to go and I LOVE the web broswer version. All I can do is put forward my issues with Xero touch, that’s great it’s working for you but for me it doesn’t work simple as that.
samsonite
This would be awesome if i could enter my petrol costs into the system whilst im on the go. Fingers crossed for the future…
I’m new to Xero and so far am very impressed with its ease of use whilst having Xero mobile would be hugely beneficial to me, i would rather wait until they’ve pushed out a few releases and ironed out bugs. The demand is obviously high but Xero should not rush this especially as they have had a fantastic response to the existing system. Whilst i’m eager please take your time in making this awesome.
Francisco
I like it is a good step in the right direction. How do I add receipts that are not expenses to be reimbursed back to me. I am a freelance, all my expenses are direct receipts so I do not need to add a new expense to be claimed just a new receipt.
When can I download it from the Apps store?
f
GW Bush
@fran It’s on the internets…
Wuzzakc
Where can this app for my iphone be downloaded. I have searched the APP store and cant find it. Thanks.
[...] of online accounting vendor Xero, talking about the trade-offs his company has had to look at when developing its mobile version, called Xero Touch. It’s a very informative account and gives a strong flavor of some of the factors to bear in [...]
Tim
Just wondering – is a Windows Phone version on the way now that Mango has arrived with its improved web browser capabilities?
[...] can find out more about the app here but below is a list of questions Xero knows you’ll want [...]
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